Author: mccrillm

I first encountered Passing in Professor Seiler’s Celtic revival course during my first year at Dickinson, and in that context, the novel and Larsen exemplified the women not typically associated with the Harlem Renaissance canon. I initially found the text captivating for its approach to identity and racial constructs, and I was intrigued by Larsen as a figure of the movement. Her appeal for me was tied to the unclear narrative of her exclusion from its canon and the difference between themes in her and her peers’ work. Passing includes identity confusion, intersectionality, and women’s disenfranchisement in heterosexual relationships. That power imbalance leaves them in a position where passing’s benefits might be necessary, whereas men are more likely to assert themselves independently and critique alternate means of gaining power.

I revisited Passing this year in Professor Harris’ class on secrets in African American culture and literature where we spent more time with the text and focused on its sexual implications and contemporary critiques of the novel more. After reading Cheryl A. Wall and Judith Butler’s pieces on sexuality and identity in the novel, I was prompted to explore that aspect of it more deeply in my thesis. Comparing it to the passing narratives we read alongside it heightened my interest. Black No More and The Biography of an Ex-Colored Man are both written by men, and their focus is much more similar to the other male authored Harlem Renaissance texts. This made it clear to me that the themes I noticed in Larsen’s and Fauset’s work are not passing-related but woman and queer related.

The power dynamic in heterosexual marriages runs throughout the text and Irene and Clare’s experiences. One passage in which Irene struggles with her powerlessness takes place midway through the novel. Brian, her husband expresses his violent dislike of everything about his life as he does repeatedly, and Irene silently processes it next to him in their car. This is the pattern their relationship adopts in the text—Brian lets his emotions out as he feels them, and Irene is silent as she desperately tries to negate her own. After his explosion, the narrator tells the reader that, “Irene, watching him, was thinking: ‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.’ After all these years to still blame her like this. Hadn’t his success proved that she’d been right in insisting that he stick to his procession fight there in New York?… Was she ever to be free of it, that fear which crouched, always, deep down within her, stealing away the sense of security, the feeling of permanence, from the life which she had so admirably arranged for them all, and desired so ardently to have remain as it was?… how it frightened her, and—yes, angered her!” (57).

Brian holds all the power over Irene’s access to money, her children, her mobility, and her identity as a “real” black woman despite the biases associated with those who can pass. Their position in the car, which he is driving, is a physical representation of Brian’s control of her body, its location, and even her safety. She must prioritize her survival over her happiness, but in order to claim contentment, she must equate material success with quality of life. Her happiness is a symbolic ideal she has been trained to aspire to and struggle to maintain for “all these years.” Without her husband and black children, she would be like Clare, a traitor to her race, or a completely powerless black woman once single. The association between asserting herself and being a traitor to her husband and, implicitly, the black community as a whole.

After reading Passing through a racial and sexuality and gender lens, I can approach it more intersectionally in my thesis, for which it has been one of my inspirations. I see a parallel between my and the literary world’s evolving understanding of the book based on race initially and later understanding more of its approach to gender and sexuality. Larsen describes the frustration felt without the full empowerment of men in the fight for racial equality. Until recently, her critics perceived that as disregard for the racial struggle. Just as the fight for racial equality is remembered as the work of black men, so is the originally established Harlem Renaissance canon. I want to identify the aspects of black womanhood and queerness which I find so compelling and that were threatening to those who excluded her and others from immediate acclaim.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. Penguin, 2003.

Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote Plum Bun in 1929 after many years acting within the Harlem Renaissance movement as an editor and member of the literary elite, resisting the movement and publishers’ interest in promoting “elevated primitivism.” As Deborah McDowell points out in her introduction to Plum Bun, McDowell says Fauset did not achieve notoriety for the same reason as Nella Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, and so many other women in the movement—their works were dismissed as literal, their nuanced societal critiques overlooked. Unlike Hurston, though, Fauset has still not been fully recognized, and McDowell recounts that when she mentions the author, people ask, “’Who is he?’” Some of Fauset’s criticism of black society is evident in the first two chapters of the novel, and the things its main character, Angela, perceives as her true wants, reveal the effects of socialization on women’s desires and lives. A correlation exists between acceptance of norms as evolutionary impulse that shape the content of lives and the canon’s reflection of the judgements made about black women’s writing.

Colorism shows up almost immediately in Plum Bun when the narrator describes how the light-skinned mother, Mattie, and Angela travel separately from the other daughter and father, who are both dark-skinned. Framed as an effort to move more efficiently, the family effectively segregates itself, and this has a normalizing effect on the daughters. It is impossible to imagine that they and especially Angela would assume segregation is morally acceptable when their parents not only do not decry it, but also practice it within their family.

Not only will this shape the girls’ approach to perceived racial difference, Fauset also uses it to emphasize assumptions about skin tone within the African American population. It is no accident that the darker skinned daughter is paired with the father, suggesting she is more masculine, and prefers Saturday to Sunday, the holy day. Angela is with her light-skinned mother and enjoys doing stereotypically feminine tasks and displaying herself in what she considers glamorous settings.

Another scene is the Sunday routine outlined in Chapter two. Again, segregation acts here when Angela and her sister Virginia split Saturday and Sunday as their individual days. Angela’s day as Sunday, and the narrator says, “She was only twelve at this time, yet she had already developed a singular aptitude and liking for the care of the home, and this her mother gratefully fostered” (Fauset 20). Angela seems to assume that her affinity for the tasks she goes on to describe are natural and genuinely her inclinations. I would challenge that and assert that socialization of gender norms is in action at least within this family. Angela’s mother has a key role in Angela’s adoption of this routine when she “fostered” it.

Angela’s mother, Mattie, is not only the person supporting Angela’s domesticity, but also the little girls model for the way she practices these activities. Fauset writes, “She set the muffins in the oven, pursing her lips and frowning a little just as she had seen her mother do; then she went to the fort of the narrow, enclosed staircase and called “hoo-hoo” with a soft rising inflection,— ‘last call to dinner,’ her father termed it” (Fauset 21). Angela mimics her mother, the same person who models passing for her and her partner in their segregated household. She acts out the physical signs of frustration, “pursing her lips” and “frowning,” as pleasurable, failing to consider her mother’s indicated displeasure with those obligations. Perhaps her mother “fostered” this behavior because she does not enjoy doing all the household work Angela aspires to.

Angela’s believes that her desires are her own, as evidenced by her frustration with going to church. Angela finds herself, “wondering at just what period of one’s life existence began to shape itself as you wanted it” (Fauset 22). It does not occur to Angela that the activities she would choose are also a function of her socialization.  This section, without explicitly saying that internal racism or gender roles are reinforced within African American families, demonstrates it and its effects on the children. The children do not know that their activities are not the natural instincts they believe, but rather the result of lifelong conditioning. This is the same training that critics of Fauset and other women received, which led them to assume their texts were simple denouncements of black men and traditional roles rather than the societal pressures that, when unexamined, force people into lifelong paths. If they choose their own, as Fauset did, their narratives are ignored.

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. Beacon, 1990.

Henry Louis Gates’ “What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom” is a critique of a criticism by Joyce Joyce, a well-lauded black female critic who wrote “The Black Canon.” His criticism focuses on a woman’s work, but his evidence almost entirely relies on men’s criticism and literary writing. His connection to Africa through travel and scholarship combined with his appointment to a position named for one of what he feels to be the great African American legends cast this piece in an interesting light, suggesting the critic’s concern for his own legacy.

Gates came from a very working class background, but transitioned to elite institutions of learning. He went to a local junior college and left for Yale University bachelor’s degree in history. After graduating, Gates transitioned into exploring Africa physically and academically. He took a leave of absence after graduating to travel through Africa, serving as an anesthetist in Tanzania. This fact, though unrelated to his later work, made me wonder if he was inspired by differences in treatment of black people in hospitals in America versus Africa. It has been documented that black people in America are often given lesser diagnoses and less pain medication, and I know that many minority scholars who travel to Europe or a country where they are the majority experience a significant shift in their sense of self.

It seems clear that Gates’ travel did impact him in some way because when he moved on to study at Cambridge University, he was under the tutelage of a Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka is the one responsible for persuading Gates to study literature, for which he received a doctorate degree in 1979. He then taught at several institutions, including Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard.

At Harvard, he was appointed the W.E.B. du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. This stuck out to me because in my source, Gates brings up Du Bois multiple times in mixed levels of praise and condemnation. He begins one section by saying that he is going to highlight the “salient points” of Joyce’s piece, which he proceeds to undermine by saying that the first only reveals the stupidity of Joyce’s student quoted in the article. He says of her reaction he deems faulty that any good teacher, including Du Bois, would have told Joyce’s student, “back to the text and told her to read it again” (Gates 354). He goes on to refer to her as not a full teacher and suggests that her opinion that authors have failed to be clear to readers is in fact her own failing as a scholar.

The next mention of Du Bois in the article is to refer to him as, “a mediocre poet and a terrible novelist” (Gates 355). He does this in the part of his argument where he says Joyce is categorically wrong to say the best critics are creatives. In what I think is a clear move to align himself with Du Bois, Gates mocks the almost legendary figure, writing, “Du Bois was probably the very first systematic literary and cultural theorist in the tradition. Rather, we genuflect to Du Bois” (355).

This fact about Gates’ career really changed the way I perceived his treatment of Du Bois in the article. Clearly, Gates thinks highly of himself and his conclusions from his repeated totalitarian dismissal of any others as wrong or rather passive aggressively as “muddled” (356). If Gates feels himself to be in the same group as Du Bois, it would explain more fully the extent to which he takes Joyce’s criticism of respected critics so personally. She suggests that some black critics have attempted to assimilate into whiteness, and Du Bois repeatedly asks his audience if different things he does in his criticism make him “less black.” I am not suggesting that this is Gates’ primary interest, but the article was written two years after he received that title, which might have put Du Bois in his mind as a predecessor or peer. It also seems to make him feel as though he can completely dismiss Joyce and many other ideas. Furthermore, his thoughts should be, as he phrased it, genuflected to. His piece’s themes of “legacy” and “integrity” and repeated defense of himself reflect a goal of legendary status he fears more intersectional criticism might upset. In this way, his response to a women’s criticism of black male writing is very familiar.

Gates, Henry Louis. “‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom.” New Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2, 1987, pp. 345–362. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/468733.

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encylclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 24 Oct. 2014. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Louis-Gates-Jr.

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.

As I work toward defining my interests and nailing down the characteristics I would like to study and eventually organize a thesis around, I find that my reading history is punctuated by extreme interest in works that surprise me. I do not mean that they surprise me through their plot twists, but rather that they do not fit in with the works that typically are associated with their era of origin. I am interested in works and authors who are not part of the definition of their literary eras, which are time separations controversial in their own right. I am drawn to works by overlooked demographics, particularly members of those demographics who were not actually separate from the literary establishment during their lives, but who were forced to remain outside the prominence of their peers. Two key terms that I think define my thoughts so far are canon formulation and defying assumptions about a period through gender, race, and sexuality.

Defying assumptions in my case applies to the preconceived notions about what defines a period of literature and the women and queer individuals in eras and movements of literature who do not fit them. Though these periods and genres are very different in time and style, the individuals I am interested in are all excluded almost entirely from the accepted canon they are taught from. While their work is not included in the keywords of their periods, women and queer individuals were often present and influential in the circles that produced works, authors, and relics of their time. From the work of women in to establish literary salons in eighteenth century England whose are mostly left out of that era’s history, to the women who pioneered the novel as a genre which was only validated when men adopted it as a forum for quality narratives.

Nella Larsen’s work is read but not widely read, despite her role in the Harlem Renaissance influencer group. She worked on publications including the Opportunity, and The Brownie Book. She was friends with key influencers including Du Bois, and her first novel, Quicksand, was popular and acclaimed at its time. Despite all of this, her work was left out of curriculum and association with both Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance until very recently. Similarly, Jessie Fauset was ignored as a producer at the time, thought she was very present in the social circle where the Harlem Renaissance mission and characteristics were debated and cemented.

Something that unites many authors I am interested in is their fleeting prominence at the time they were producing. As in all things, women and minorities must reach near perfection to be acknowledged along with majority member counterparts. In the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen was accused later in her career of plagiarism. Despite being the first African American woman to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship, she was almost entirely forgotten after the scandal. She was only mentioned in regards to that stain until fairly recently when critics and readers returned in greater numbers to her work, including Quicksand and Passing.

This process of exclusion and how the definitions of sections of the literary timeline are a source of interest for me. In my discussions with professors, I have pinpointed that as the historical side of what I am looking at. As I look into the works and their creators that interest me, I find that there are usually reasons that have been used to defend their exclusion from the teaching and acclaiming body of texts. The Larsen example is one of many, including Zora Neale Hurston, whose work has surged into much greater prominence, but who was also excluded for controversial views despite her key role in the movement along with male leaders who were never rejected from the group the academy focuses on.

The keywords I have focused on are tightly twined together, and something that also interests me is that connection. As I move forward, I want to explore the three mentioned reasons that the excluded works are treated thus (race, gender, sexuality). I am interested in finding out whether the canon was defined before the works were excluded, or if part of defining literary eras has been purposefully constructing them to achieve that purpose. This is important if one wants to change the future of literary and cultural studies. Whatever cause and effect took place in early canon formation set a legacy that affected the Harlem Renaissance writers I focused on here, and that if left untouched, will continue in our current time and into the future. In the age of technology, it will become much more difficult to determine the pattern and to alter it. I think I’ll be looking at analysis of canon formation and more primary texts moving forward. While simply forcing more inclusion in literary study is an important part, the historian part of my mind leads me to believe that without focusing on what has happened, meaningful understanding and change cannot be made.

Judith Fetterley’s Introduction to The Resisting Reader is a strident statement of discontent with the way Fetterley feels the canon of American literature has been constructed. Fetterley begins by claiming that literature is political and sees it as necessary to inform her audience that this is “painful to admit” (991). This is confusing because she seems to be entirely motivated and fascinated rather than pained by political interests and self-interest. She includes a quote from John Keats supporting her assertion, and the time between the quote and her writing suggests that her assertion about political intents is not shocking or painful at all. Fetterley uses similar language throughout the essay and the first section of it, throwing terms such as “universal truths” and “confusion of consciousness” to make her statements seem more groundbreaking and revolutionary.

Fetterley relies more on the tone of her article than her actual argument to create that impression because her assertions are not revolutionary, and her demands are really just as exclusionary as the status quo she critiques. She creates a binary distinction between male and female, leaving out a plethora of excluded groups. She seems not to care about true inclusivity, but rather the inclusion of her narrative. Her seeming ignorance, based on its absence from her text, of people of color, gender queer, and non-binary individuals suggests a lack of reflection on self in preparation for writing this piece.

What “male” means to Fetterley is not expressly defined in this introduction, but that is almost as revealing as a definition would be. Because she chooses not to tell her audience what she means by the two identifiers her entire argument hinges, her writing exposes the ways she does exactly what she rebels against throughout the introduction. She assumes that her understanding of male and female is obvious, or as she likes to say, “universal” (991). That is not only ironic but suggests the lack of self-examination that becomes clearer and clearer as she continues her argument.

A moment that stuck out as relevant to my impressions was when Fetterley states, “To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literature is perforce to identify as male” (991). This sentence reveals assumptions she has made about the nature of reading based on her individual experience. Fetterley believes that to read something and gain from the experience, the audience member has to identify with the subject or author’s sexual identity.

She says in her “Rip Van Winkle” example that, “universal desire is made specifically male. Work, authority, and decision-making, are symbolized by Dame Van Winkle, and the longing for flight is defined against her” (991). These, I would argue, are not the typical attributes stereotypically given to women and men. The stark contrasts she chooses to make support a reading of her as a binary and exclusionary thinker. She seems to see the term as a designated sex at birth rather than a spectrum. Much of this is a result of the time at which she was writing, but she also leaves out all racial identities aside from white, and that was not the only critical approach to literature in 1978.

Her focus on “female” inclusion in literary canon assemblage is not a fault, but her refusal to acknowledge any other group or identification that is left out of foundational literature (991). She also relies entirely on texts from long before she wrote this piece such as “Rip Van Winkle”, which forces her to pursue a negative argument in her opening that continues throughout the piece. She chooses not to argue for the merits of works including the female voice forces her to pursue an entirely negative argument. Rather than currying emphatic support, her rhetorical strategy and general diction choice led me and likely other audience members to have an echo reaction to her work, rejecting her narrow goals for the canon.