To what extent, and in what ways, do the texts on the course engage with
the politics of gender?
PROMPT:
TITLE: From
Symbol to Sexualisation: Reclaiming Black Femininity in the work of
Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Tony Morrison
ABSTRACT:
From Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave to the 1960s Black Arts Movement and beyond, Black American
Fiction has had a long legacy of politicised writing dedicated to the emancipation of the African American man.
The surge of black women’s writing which followed in the 1970s, however, is interpreted by such feminist
critics as Barbara Christian as an indication that the Civil Rights Movement and its associated events had
privileged masculinity at the expense of female liberation. Conducting a survey of writers such as W.E.B. Du
Bois, Richard Wright, and Walter Moseley, this essay begins with an exploration of the complicity with which
‘malestream’ writers participate in the depersonalisation and sexualisation of black women. Guided by Slavoj
Žižek’s Lacanian distinction between the Symbolic and the Real in his essay ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as
Thing’ (1994), female marginalisation is categorised into the sexual and the symbolic, with the former referring
to the subjugation of female humanity to the eroticised body, and the latter referring to the erosion of female
selfhood beneath the homogenising social and metaphysical meanings attributed to them by virtue of their
gender. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God (1937), and Toni
Morrison’s Paradise (1997) offer varying accounts of symbolic and sexual dehumanisation as it is experienced by
black women and elucidate their double-enslavement to race and gender. In addition to bringing the unique
dilemma of the Black woman into sharp relief, however, these authors also make a concerted effort to
distinguish, with militant clarity, the forcibly ‘Symbolic’ and sexualised selves of their female characters from
the ‘Real’ ones which lie beneath. In doing so, these female authors are found both to provide a pulpit for their
silenced demographic, and to call for readers to regain possession of their long-embattled sense of selfhood.
In 1853, Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave presented to American readers the character of escaped slave
Madison Washington (179). As a man with ‘thoughts and wishes’ and ‘faculties as far as angel's flight’ (177), and yet
‘galled with irons’ and ‘robbed by society [of his] just rights’ (179;195), Madison’s embodiment of the incontestable
humanity of the enslaved placed unprecedented pressure on the logic that excluded American negroes from the language
of American liberty. Douglass’s work began a tradition of highly politicised writing by Black Americans, aimed not only
at asserting their humanity, but equally importantly at gauging and curtailing the epistemic violence of institutional
racism. The Black Arts Movement and the more expansive Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s are widely regarded as a
culmination of these literary calls to action. They are also, however, deeply associated both with ‘monolithic formulations’
of authentic blackness1 and with the sustained marginalisation of black women. Among the literary critics who decried
this inequality was Barbara Christian, who would stress in her ‘Race for Theory’ that the ‘surge’ of black women’s writing
in the 1970s was sparked in part because ‘when the ideologues of the 1960s said black, they meant black male’ (2135). Du
1
‘Introduction to Barbara Christian’, 2127
1
Bois had protested in 1902 that the ‘swarthy spectre’ of racism remained in spite of the ‘forty years of renewal and
development’ which followed the abolition of slavery (Illustrated 17); yet as late as 1990, renowned cultural critic bell
hooks2 would underscore that black literary culture still seemed ‘not to know black women exist’ (2510). Moving from a
survey of ‘malestream’ writers such as W.E.B. DuBois and Richard Wright to a concentration on the works of Nella
Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, this essay explores the ways in which Black American literature
contributed to, and coped with, the marginalisation of coloured women throughout the 20th century.
The dilemma of ‘invisibility’, analogous with social marginalisation, was well-known to Black twentieth-century
writers. The sustained metaphor of the ‘veil’ in DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, which first appeared at the childhood
moment in which he recognised that his colouring made him ‘different from others’ (12), functioned as a material
representation of social ostracism, and the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) would be touched by the
veil in his awareness that his innocent presence in a white neighbourhood risked igniting suspicions that he was ‘trying to
rob or rape somebody’ (74). Psychiatrist and colonial theorist Frantz Fanon shed light upon this painful selfconsciousness in his polemical Black Skin, White Masks (1952) when he described ‘difficulties in the development [of ]
bodily schema’ as a specific predicament of the coloured man within a ‘white world’ (110). This inescapable ‘third-person
consciousness’ (110) of one’s own blackness, identical to the ‘double-consciousness’ described by DuBois (Illustrated 3)
can also be extended, however, to that of one’s femininity. When the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God (1937) is first introduced to us through the gaze of the men of Eatonville, her ‘great rope of black
hair,’ ‘firm buttocks’, and ‘pugnacious breasts’ are described in a textural language which makes palpable the eroticisation
of her body. The figurative ‘grape fruits in her hip pockets’ and breasts that ‘bore holes’ in her clothing, meanwhile,
attribute to the objectified flesh a sovereign and even unruly agency (3). Janie is thus overwhelmingly sexualised, so that it
is not until she begins to tell her story that she is allowed to transcend her physicality and become fully human. Equally
fraught by sexualisation is Karintha in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), whom men had always wanted, ‘even as a child,’ and
for whom they ‘counted time to pass’ until she would be ‘old enough to mate with them’ (5). In response to the death of
his infant son, DuBois had called himself a ‘fool’ for wishing ‘that his little soul should grow choked and deformed by the
veil,’ instead rejoicing that his son was ‘not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free’ (Souls 151). Karintha, however, was not
to escape ‘[t]his interest of the male [which] could do no good for her’, and at twenty, following an illegitimate childbirth
and the persisting desires of men, ‘the soul of her’ is petrified, doomed to be ‘a growing thing ripened too soon’ (Toomer
5;6). If Frantz Fanon can consider himself to be ‘overdetermined from without’ by his blackness, and hence ‘the slave [of
2
Name not to be capitalised
2
his] own appearance’ (115), we can consider the coloured woman to thus be doubly enslaved. She is veiled from the
outside world and denied full humanity by her reduction not only into a coloured body, but into a gendered one.
Yet the role of sexualisation in the dehumanisation of the female is only a partial explanation for her sustained
subjugation in mainstream literature and theory. Following three decades of theorisation into gender, race, and sexuality,
Slavoj Žižek’s 1994 essay ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing’ uncovers a deeper dimension to female marginalisation.
Building upon Lacan’s distinction between the Symbolic and the Real, in which the Symbolic represents the ‘sphere of
the signifier’ and the Real is ‘the world before it is carved up by language [in] the symbolic social world’ (‘Introduction to
Žižek’ 2404), Žižek argues that the woman, in being subject to the trope of the ethereal and elusive Lady, functions in
society not as a ‘warm [and] understanding fellow-creature’, but rather a symbolic object (2407). Reduced to an ‘abstract
Ideal’ (2407), the Lady is emptied of ‘real substance’ and valued not for her ‘wisdom’, or ‘even her competence,’3
functioning instead as ‘a mirror onto which the subject projects his narcissistic ideal’ (2408). This ‘narcissistic projection’,
masquerading as an elevation of the Lady to a status of ‘spiritual purification,’ emerges instead as an act of
dehumanisation, so that she becomes ‘someone with whom no relationship of empathy is possible’ (2408).
Such reduction of women to a ‘narcissistic projection’ as that described by Žižek can be identified across Black
American texts. In Wright’s Native Son, Mary is ‘loved and regarded as [the white world’s] symbol of beauty’ (Wright 194)
and her murder, both in enabling Bigger to feel that he had ‘evened the score’ and in igniting a collective response from
the whites of the city in which ‘many windows in the Negro sections were smashed’ (194;274), takes on a symbolic
quality which far transcends a concern with the death of her person. This systemic denigration of the female also extends
into the realm of personal relationships. Bigger’s desire to split the ‘two Bessies’, in order that he may ‘sweep away’ the
‘Bessie on Bessie’s face’ and leave her body lying ‘helpless and yielding before him’, is an instance in which he yearns to
privilege the symbolic Bessie over the real; the ‘body that he had just had’ over the ‘face’ which ‘asked questions’ (170).
Moreover, Max’s reduction of the murders of both Mary and Bessie to an ‘act of creation,’ combined with his assertion
that Bigger ‘did not kill,’ but was rather ‘living, only as he knew how’, buries the real implications of their deaths beneath
their symbolic significance to a single male’s search for ‘self-actualisation’ (475). Some years later, Sybil of Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man (1952) would reaffirm a two-dimensional and apolitical femininity in saying of her husband that he ‘talks a
lot about women’s rights, but what does he know about what a woman needs?’ (521). As late as 2004, Charles Blakey of
3
From Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge (1992) p. 150
3
Walter Moseley’s The Man in My Basement would reduce Narciss Gully to ‘a mirror and an echo chamber, giving me back
every word uttered and gesture made’ so that ‘I had a chance to alter my behaviour’ (178). These novels fully enact
Žižek’s notion of the ‘woman as thing’, a blank surface which reflects the narcissistic projections of society and assists in
the self-actualisation of men. Thus when Ellison’s Invisible Man said of blackness that ‘you wonder whether you aren’t
simply a phantom in other people’s minds’ (4), he may just as well have been speaking for women.
How did female writers address the reduction of their selves into both symbolic and sexual currency? Nella
Larsen’s Passing (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997) all
take issue with the erosion of the female ‘self’ beneath sexualisation and symbolisation. Nella Larsen’s Passing hones in on
the versatility offered to females by the insignificance of their ‘selves’, but exposes this form of social mobility to be
fraught with conflict. Clare Kendry, through a beauty ‘beyond challenge’ (191), is able to make the transition from a
‘pathetic little girl on a ragged blue sofa’(172) to a high-class and ostensibly white lady. Indeed, her act of ‘passing’ was
first noted in a sighting of her ‘with a man, unmistakably white, and evidently rich’ (181). Yet due to the nature of this
uniquely feminine social mobility, hinged on marriage and thus the cultivation of desire within men, it is only through the
infiltration of Irene’s household that Clare is able to re-enter Negro society. Donning an ‘exquisite’ beauty which makes
Irene feel ‘dowdy and commonplace’ (233;234), Clare nurtures in Irene’s sons an ‘admiration that verged on adoration’
(238) and makes customary her attendance, ‘alone with Brian,’ to bridge parties and benefit dances (239). Self-described
as ‘wrapped up in my boys and the running of my house’ (240), Irene is filled with ‘foreboding dread’ by the resultantly
‘guarded reserve’ of her husband (247) and feels ‘no more to him than a pane of glass through which he stared’ (248).
Thus, with ‘the face in the mirror’ that ‘vanishe[s] from her sight’ (250), the endangerment of Irene’s social position
reveals the transparency which lies beneath. Mother and wife have been allowed to cannibalise the self; the ‘Real’, in
other words, has eroded beneath the facade of the ‘Symbol’. It is thus in a moment of mutual despair that Clare bemoans
motherhood as ‘the cruellest thing in the world’, and Irene is forced to admit that ‘no one is ever completely happy, or
free, or safe’ (227). Irene’s wish that ‘Clare should die’ (261), and Clare’s eventual ‘death by misadventure’ (275), are
indicative that for Larsen, the narrowly restricted mobility of women within a man’s world can have serious
consequences.
Although racial identity features in Passing, it is perhaps this emphasis on the reduction of women to their symbolic
function which leads writers such as Charles R. Larson to argue that the primary theme is ‘not race (as has usually been
interpreted) but marital stability’ (xv). With a similar emphasis on gender, Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God presents
4
to us Janie at sixteen, with ‘glossy leaves and bursting buds’ and dreams of being ‘any tree in bloom’ (15). Yet when
Nanny interprets the sight of Johnny Taylor ‘lacerating her Janie with a kiss’ with such foreboding that it comes to
resemble ‘a manure pile after a rain’, (16; 17) these girlish visions are obliterated. Janie’s pleading that she ‘ain’t no real
‘oman yet’ (17) and Nanny’s ‘weeping internally for both of them’ (19) re-inscribe the ‘singing bees’ (15) of Janie’s sexual
awakening as a tragedy. Nanny’s famous remark that ‘[d]e nigger woman is de mule uh de world’ (19), moreover,
reinforces the double-enslavement of the coloured woman to both her race and her sexualisation. Although race features,
the all-black setting of Eatonville enables a departure from the reactionary dimension of black experience in a white
world. It was indeed only ‘when thrown against a sharp white background’ that Hurston claimed to ‘feel most coloured’
(‘Coloured Me’), and we are correspondingly blind to Janie’s ‘coffee-and-cream complexion’ in Their Eyes until it is noted
by Mrs. Turner, a ‘colour-struck’ character who grades social superiority against degrees of whiteness (187;198). This
otherwise ‘colour-blind’ backdrop of racial egalitarianism makes more emphatic Jody’s takeover of the coloured town of
Eatonville through a replication of older forms of classism, so that the town ‘looked like a servant’s quarters surrounding
the “big house”’ painted a ‘gloaty, sparkly white’ (63). More importantly, however, it brings Janie’s gendered restriction to
the symbolic role of ‘bell-cow’ and ‘Mrs Mayor Starks’ (55;71) into sharp relief.
The clean separation of race and gender in Their Eyes ensures that Janie’s subjection to domestic and verbal abuse
is presented as a form of oppression which persists beyond the harsh confines of racial conflict. In contrast, Toni
Morrison’s Paradise offers a uniquely precise linkage between racism and female subjugation in the town of Ruby and its
all-black community of 8-rocks. The town’s suspicion of Pat Best’s light-skinned mother, which ‘reminded them of why
Haven (the original post-emancipation town) existed’ (200), closely parallels the contempt of DuBois for what he calls
the ‘red stain of bastardy’, a feature which for him would forever represent ‘two centuries of systematic legal defilement
of Negro women’ (Illustrated 19). In choosing to ‘typify’ as a symbol of slavery the Negro woman who ‘had laid herself
low to [her master’s] lust, and born a tawny man-child to the world’ (Illustrated 46), DuBois advocates a reactionary image
of female sexual continence and corresponding racial purity as a symbol of the post-emancipation era. The highly
gendered consequences of this obsession with purity, which would inevitably translate into the constriction of women
into ‘narcissistic projections’ of the town’s virtuosity, are rampant within Morrison’s town of Ruby. The novel opens on
the siege of the convent women by armed men because their lifestyle ‘call[ed] into question the value of almost every
woman [they] knew’ (8) and they were accused, in their resemblance of a ‘new and obscene breed of female’, of
‘desecrating the vision [of Ruby]’ and having ‘doomed to extinction’ the virtuous women of the town’s historic
foundations (279). Pat Best had indeed remarked of their conservatism that ‘everything that worries them must come
5
from women’ (Morrison 217), and the extent of the town’s obsession with female chastity is evident in the case of her
daughter, Billie Delia. Although a virgin, the day she ‘pulled down her Sunday panties’ as a three-year-old girl to ride her
favourite horse forged a widespread and life-long belief in her promiscuity, so that ‘although it was Arnette who had sex
at fourteen,’ Billie Delia ‘carried the burden’ (151). The disparity between her ‘self’ and her symbolic representation in the
social world, widened by the dogmatically symbolic function of Ruby’s women and the consequently strict policing of
female behaviour, is solidified in Pat’s concession that the Royal Ease iron, used to attack her daughter for allegedly lewd
behaviour, was intended ‘to smash the young girl that lived in the minds of the 8-rocks’ rather than ‘the girl her daughter
was’ (204).
While Hurston and Morrison closely follow Larsen in their exploration of the dehumanisation of the female, it is
in their resolution of this troubled relationship between the Symbolic and the Real that the two latter texts depart.
Watching the ‘shadow of herself’, ‘tending the store and prostrating itself before Jody’ while ‘she herself sat under a shady
tree’ (Hurston 103), Janie becomes aware that her ‘self’ is split between the personal and the social. Her eventual
recognition, following a beating by Joe, that ‘she had an inside and an outside now’ and ‘knew how not to mix them’ (97),
marked the reclaimed ownership of her symbolic self as a façade to serve her needs, so that while she was ‘weeping and
wailing outside’ on the death of Joe Starks, ‘[i]nside the expensive black folds were resurrection and life’ (119). It is only
at the funeral of Tea Cake that Janie’s inside and outside are fully in sync; while she had ‘starched and ironed her face’ for
Jody’s funeral, ‘forming it into just what people wanted to see’ (116), she wears overalls for Tea Cake because she is ‘too
busy feeling grief to dress like grief’ (254). Made whole by the expansion of her horizon and yet saved from ‘self-crushing
love’ (172) by Tea Cake’s untimely death, Janie’s remark that he ‘could never be dead until she had finished feeling and
thinking’ evokes a similar dynamic to that of Bigger when he wishes to gather Bessie’s ‘yielding’ self into ‘some place
deep inside him’, ‘to have and hold whenever he wanted’ (Wright 170). It is Tea Cake, this time, who is reduced to a prop
for Janie’s self-actualisation.
In the painting of their bodies on the basement floor, a similar reclamation of the symbolic self enables the
convent women of Morrison’s Paradise to achieve their self-actualisation. Though the Symbolic and the Real occasionally
merge, with the artists having to be reminded ‘of the moving bodies they were, so seductive were the alive ones below’
(265), the result is that they are ‘no longer haunted’ (266). Indeed, while the men saw ‘defilement’ and ‘perversions’ and
‘lovingly drawn filth’ in the images (287), Anna Flood saw instead ‘the turbulence of females trying to bridle, without
being trampled, the monsters that slavered them’ (303). As a masochistic character who turned to self-mutilation after
6
years of rape and sexual harassment had convinced her that ‘there was something inside her that made boys snatch her
and men flash her’ (261), Seneca’s pivotal decision to bypass the act of self-mutilation on her person and instead ‘mark
the body lying open on the cellar floor’ (265) evinces the women’s realisation that they can shed their forcibly symbolic
and sexualised selves, and thus be free to cultivate the Real which lies beneath. Irene Redfield may have felt an impulse to
collapse her symbolic imprisonment in her ‘uncontrollable urge’, during the decorous tea party where she first sensed
Brian’s infidelity, ‘to laugh, to scream,’ to ‘shock people’ and to make them ‘aware of her suffering’ (Larsen 252), but it is
only in the work of Hurston and Morrison that the women truly overcome their symbolisation in the fulfilment of the
Real.
Arguing that it is ‘no accident’ that rap has ‘usurped the primary position of rhythm and blues’ for contemporary
youths, bell hooks cites in African Americans a ‘longing for a critical voice’ which is shared by all marginalised peoples
(2513). That the ‘renaissance’ of black women’s literature was a reaction to the inadequacy of the Civil Rights Movement,
witnessing the emergence of new writers such as Walker and Morrison as well as the excavation of lost authors such as
Larsen and Hurston,4 certainly suggests the desire for a voice which could affirm what Barbara Smith described as ‘the
recognition that Black and female identity coexist’ (2227). Whilst mainstream Black fiction had concerned itself with the
lived experience of racial segregation, often forgetting the existence of their women beyond the blank space they served
as for the ‘narcissistic projections’ of their race, Black women writers sought to voice the double-burden of race and sex
which defined the experiences of coloured women. Thus while there was ‘no pulpit’ for Janie’s grandmother to preach
her ‘great sermon’ (Hurston 22), Janie is eventually able to tell the story of her life in ‘soft’ and ‘easy phrases’ (13) – an act
which finalises her self-realisation. The ‘loud dreaming’ of the convent women as they relived the ‘half-tales’ of their
difficult lives, moreover, was an essential element of the body-painting which enabled them to distinguish the Symbolic
selves from the Real (Morrison 264). Barbara Christian would stress that it is through theorisation in narrative that
coloured women, for lack of other outlets, have ‘survive[d] with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, [our]
countries, [and] our very humanity’ (2129). Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison each sought to free
their characters through the indelible power of speech. In doing so, however, they also provided their silenced
demographic with the critical voice to capture and to protest their enslavement beneath symbol and sexualisation.
4
‘Introduction to Barbara Smith’ 2221
7
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