UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

“A GRIEVOUS NECESSITY”: THE SUBJECT OF MARRIAGE IN TRANSATLANTIC MODERN WOMEN’S NOVELS: WOOLF, RHYS, FAUSET, LARSEN, AND HURSTON

A dissertation submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.)

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences

2004

by

Kristin Kommers Czarnecki

B.A., University of Notre Dame 1991 M.A., Northwestern University 1997

Committee Chair: Arlene Elder ABSTRACT

“A GRIEVOUS NECESSITY”: THE SUBJECT OF MARRIAGE IN TRANSATLANTIC MODERN WOMEN’S NOVELS: WOOLF, RHYS, FAUSET, LARSEN, AND HURSTON

My dissertation analyzes modern women’s novels that interrogate the role of marriage in the construction of female identity. Mapping the character of Clarissa in The Voyage Out

(1915), “Mrs. Dalloway’s Party” (1923), and primarily Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I highlight

Woolf’s conviction that negotiating modernity requires an exploratory yet protected consciousness for married women. Rhys’s early novels, Quartet (1929), After Leaving Mr.

Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), portray women excluded from the rite of marriage in British society. Unable to counter oppressive

Victorian mores, her heroines invert the modernist impulse to “make it new” and face immutability instead, contrasting with the enforced multiplicity of identity endured by women of color in Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929) and Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929).

Hurston’s last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), indicts American race and gender relations in the story of a white woman’s modification of her identity within an abusive marriage. In each novel, marital crises reflect the experience of becoming “modern,” of attaining female selfhood in sexually, socially, and racially complicated milieus.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank Alison Rieke and Amy Elder for their unfailing support of my work.

Their scholarly expertise, their warmth and friendship, and above all their deep love of literature

continue to inspire me. I am also indebted to Maggy Lindgren, Wayne Hall, and Marty

Wechselblatt, whose courses, conversation, and kindness guided me throughout my studies at the

University of Cincinnati. Very special thanks goes to Drew Shannon for countless hours spent

listening to my ideas and assuaging my angst. Special thanks also to Traci Curl for her friendship and, due to her own Ph.D., her understanding of the challenges of doctoral work. I would like to express my gratitude to my parents, Donald and Nancy Kommers, for their support in this and all of my endeavors. Most of all, I wish to thank my husband Paul for his love, encouragement, and sacrifices over the past five years. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ………………………………………………………………………2

Chapter One – Clarissa Dalloway’s Modern Marriage ………………………….17

Chapter Two – “Cut to an Echo”: Jean Rhys’s Immutable Modernity ………….65

Chapter Three – Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and the Multiplicity of Modern Identity ………………………………………………113

Chapter Four – Modified Female Identity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee …………………………………………………..173

Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….215

Works Cited ……………………………………………………………………222 2

Introduction

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was preparing the Cambridge lectures on women and fiction that would become the text of A Room of One’s Own the following year. In October

1928, Zora Neale Hurston apprenticed herself to a voodoo priestess in New Orleans as part of

her research on African-American folklore. On the surface, two more dissimilar women and

experiences could hardly be found, yet Virginia Woolf and Zora Neale Hurston do warrant

comparison. Both were vanguards of their literary coteries. Both sought to articulate human experience through literary innovation, creating complex female characters and narratives. Both located similar expressions of intense emotion.

In her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), for instance, Woolf writes that war veteran

Septimus Warren Smith is overcome after hearing his wife utter the word “time.” In his mind,

“The word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time. He sang” (Mrs.

Dalloway 78). In Hurston’s short story “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933), Joe May is devastated to find his wife with another man. “The great belt on the wheel of Time slipped and eternity stood still,” Hurston writes. “The shapeless enemies of humanity that live in the hours of Time had waylaid Joe. He was assaulted in his weakness. Like Samson awakening after his haircut. So he just opened his mouth and laughed” (Hurston Reader 213-14). Woolf and Hurston’s choice

of the same metaphor to convey inner conflict, with characters crying out when faced with time’s

magnitude and brutality, is one of many parallels between Anglo and African-American modern

women’s literature. My dissertation, “A Grievous Necessity”: The Subject of Marriage in

Transatlantic Modern Women’s Novels, examines works by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Jessie 3

Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston as they explore the construction of

women’s identity in marriage throughout their novels and stories. In many ways emancipated in

their own lives, they nevertheless focus in their narratives upon women’s entrapment in marriage. The juxtaposition of literary innovation with repressive social tradition is a hallmark of transnational women’s modernism and the means by which they dissect matrimony, the

“grievous necessity,” the foremost requirement of patriarchal discourse.

My title comes from Helga Crane’s opinion, in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), of the

social importance of marriage for women. The writers I explore, of English, Anglo-Caribbean,

African-American, and Danish-West Indian heritage, bridge cultural, racial, and international

divides in locating marriage as a crucial site of modernist efforts at establishing women’s

subjectivity. Each narrative underscores the discrete nature of consciousness. Together they

highlight the crosscurrents among culturally constructed gender roles and domestic tropes,

demonstrating, in Paul Gilroy’s words, that “the distinctiveness of the modern self might reside

in its being a necessarily fractured or compound entity” (46).

Just as Jennifer De Vere Brody “mines the intersection of the supposedly distinct fields of

Victorian studies and African American studies” in her book, Impossible Purities: Blackness,

Femininity, and Victorian Culture (1998 6), my thesis knits together the academically distinct yet intriguingly corresponding realms of Anglo and African-American modernism.1 The term

1 Scholars note the divisions between Anglo and ethnic/non-Western literary studies and acknowledge that the latter generally receives short shrift. Houston A. Baker, Jr., believes the Harlem Renaissance “has frequently [and erroneously] been faulted for its ‘failure’ to produce vital, original, effective, or ‘modern’ art in the manner, presumably, of British, Anglo-American, and Irish creative endeavors” (xiii). Baker states that African-American writers of the time produced work just as innovative as that of Joyce, Eliot, or Pound, and establishes, in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), a definition of modernism particular to African-American writers. Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthology, The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), expands upon traditional concepts of modernist writing by including writers of color, thus challenging ‘language-centered interpretations of modernism favored in the canonization process” (5). Her thesis relates to Fauset, whose novels are stylistically traditional but thematically progressive. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), Paul Gilroy laments 4 modernism denotes a period of artistic innovation and cultural experience from roughly 1910 to

1950. Stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear storytelling, and explorations of human psychology are characteristic of literary modernism, spurred by seismic shifts in society effected by the end of Victorianism, World War I, and the Great Migration of African-Americans moving from rural to urban areas. Certain women modernists, such as Woolf and Hurston, have garnered significant scholarship, while others have only begun to receive the recognition they deserve, particularly women of color like Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, whose male Harlem

Renaissance counterparts have traditionally received much greater acclaim.2 Still other women modernists, including colonial British-West Indian writer Jean Rhys, are not easily categorized and often remain on the margins of academia.3 Studying Anglo and African-American women writers together establishes a more comprehensive modernism, illuminating the unity between seemingly disparate fields and challenging the binaries often imposed on literary studies.

the “absence of a concern with ‘race’ or ethnicity from most contemporary writings about modernity” (ix). Alain Locke’s anthology, The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925) certainly illustrates that African- American writers too participated fully in early twentieth-century cultural and literary movements such as modernism. Stories like “Fog,” by John Matheus, with its chorus of voices, and “Sahdji,” by Bruce Nugent, with its narrator’s spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness interjections into his tale, are just two examples of such modern African-American literary innovation. 2 Cheryl Wall, for example, addresses the “masculinist cast” of the Harlem Renaissance (4). See Chapter One of Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). Pauline De Souza also finds that the “images of the ‘new negro’ as masculine led to problems of defining black ‘womanhood,’” and that “For Du Bois and Locke the ‘new negro’ was interpreted as male.” Pauline De Souza, “Black Awakening: Gender and Representation in the Harlem Renaissance,” Women Artists and Modernism, ed. Katy Deepwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 55, 64. 3 Like Brody, I find it imperative that works “which are thought to be distinct and mutually exclusive, are read together” (Brody 6) in order to refute paradigms relegating human experience to particular gendered, racial, and cultural realms. I agree with Ann duCille’s assertion that “almost all texts participate in larger, intercultural dialogues or polylogues” (duCille, Coupling Convention 24). 5

The Female Atlantic

Paul Gilroy’s conception of ships as agents of cultural intersection and exchange

resonates with transatlantic women writers and their works.4 Although the image of pan-African

ships evokes the Middle Passage, Gilroy views ships as positive communicators of culture,

joining borders in what Homi Bhabha defines as hybridity.5 The overt or implicit presence of

ships in the novels I examine similarly links women to complementary and clashing ideologies.

Mrs. Dalloway’s Peter Walsh sails from England to India and back again, drawing upon Western

colonial images of women in both places. Septimus Warren Smith’s Italian wife Rezia suffers

the lonely plight of foreign women in England, as do Rhys’s female figures, drifting between

London and Paris and failing to find solace or community in either place. Characters in Fauset’s

Plum Bun (1929) sail to France to try to escape America’s color prejudice. Helga Crane in

Larsen’s Quicksand books passage to Denmark for the same reason only to encounter an equally

pernicious racism once she arrives there. In Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Arvay

Meserve experiences both male violence and female autonomy aboard her husband’s shrimping

boat. Ships in each novel reflect the amalgamation and fragmentation of female identity, the

difficulty of locating a stable definition of women’s selfhood.

As Susan Stanford Friedman states, however, definitions that “mean to fence in, to fix, and to stabilize [. . .] often end up being fluid [. . .]. They serve different needs and interests”

(497). She has “no expectation, therefore, of determining or discovering a fixed meaning for terms like modern, modernity, and modernism” (497). Friedman echoes Perry Meisel, who theorizes modernism as a will toward fixity, an ill-conceived, nostalgic wish to regain something

4 Gilroy discusses the cultural history of the African diaspora in The Black Atlantic, using the “image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean as [. . .] my starting point” (4). 6

primary that he believes never in fact existed. How writers contend with this myth of the modern

provides Meisel with a benchmark for modern writers’ weakness or strength.6 Women

modernists recognize no such pre-civilization for females in patriarchal societies; if there is no

origin, there can therefore be no fixed meaning for terms like African-American, British, or

colonial either, as the writers in my study illustrate.

Jean Rhys’s father was Scots-Welsh and her mother third-generation Creole; with her

West Indian background, Rhys never identified with England despite having lived there for

nearly seventy years. Nella Larsen, with her Danish mother and black West Indian father,

experienced similar cultural confusions, at times privileging her European over her black

heritage,7 yet marrying an African-American man in part to secure “entry into a privileged

African-American world” (Davis 121). Larsen and Fauset’s mulatta characters depict the fallacy

of determining a person’s “race” through physical traits, while Woolf and Hurston’s characterizations of Anglo/Euro-American women portray the reverberations of colonialism and racism within private domestic spheres. Each writer’s women characters generally remain in

alienating urban environments; rural dwellers also fail to recover an equitable, Eden-like space.

Their search for an “original” often ends in the total loss of an already splintered identity.

Yet as Tony Jackson states, the loss of the self as subject is the subject of modernism.8

Pauline De Souza similarly finds that “[f]or the Harlem Renaissance the achievement of subjecthood was a struggle in itself” (55). The writers in my study theorize subjectivity by

5 Bhabha defines hybridity as the cross-fertilization of cultural signs and practices from colonizer/colonized cultures. See “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817” (in The Location of Culture [London, New York: Routledge, 1994] 102-122). 6 Meisel presents his theory in The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 7 In her biography of Larsen, Thadious Davis says Larsen “labeled” herself a mulatto and “projected both Danish and West Indian origins” (5), when her parentage was in fact Danish and West Indian. 8 See Tony Jackson, The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994). 7

creating women who do not move beyond culture, the socially sanctioned rite of marriage, but

strive for survival and strength within it. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar commend Jean Rhys

for “restoring and revising the past while restructuring the future” (No Man’s Land, Vol. I 208).

Woolf, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston also create collages of tradition and history in their fiction while demanding re-creations and reassessments of each, particularly regarding prevailing attitudes toward married women.

Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (1979) discusses the history of marriage in literature. Eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century novels focus on the marriage contract, Tanner explains, which conflates passion and property into a single, stabilizing force within society. Displaced figures such as adulterers, or, as I contend, women of color passing as white, women who marry for wealth and status, ostracized women excluded from marriage, or women suffering abuse within it, “represent or incarnate a potentially disruptive or socially unstabilized energy that may threaten, directly or implicitly, the organization of society” (3). While many twentieth-century women writers reject marriage as a primary subject in their fiction,9 women modernists engage the topic to explore how the female subject may develop within it.

In each novel, ideologies of class, color, and gender affect women in marriage. Tanner evokes modernist women’s writing by recognizing the “all-subsuming, all-organizing, all- containing” nature of marriage in bourgeois society, for instance. The “bourgeois novelist has no choice,” he writes, “but to engage the subject of marriage in one way or another” (Tanner 15).

9 DuPlessis names Virginia Woolf, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, and Adrienne Rich among women writers who, particularly in their letters and essays, “solve the contradictions between love and quest and to replace the alternate endings in marriage and death [. . .] by offering a different set of choices” (4). Such choices reside in “strategies that involve reparenting in invented families, fraternal-sororal ties temporarily reducing romance, and emotional attachment to women in bisexual love plots, female bonding, and lesbianism” (xi). Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 8

Of the five novelists in question, Woolf and Fauset are the most firmly ensconced in middle or

upper-middle class milieus, allowing them in Mrs. Dalloway and Plum Bun (1929) to critique bourgeois marriage for ensnaring women in a “hollow space in society” (Tanner 74). In Larsen’s

Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) and Rhys’s four early novels, Quartet (1929), After

Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight

(1939), marginalized women’s efforts to assimilate to mainstream society result in a “devastating

befogging of consciousness” (Tanner 74). Hurston’s last published novel, Seraph on the

Suwanee (1948), depicts the classism of rural environs. The rise of Arvay and Jim Meserve on the socio-economic ladder stems from Jim’s manipulation of his wife and of his African-

American laborers. Each novel portrays the link between money and marriage, as husbands expect wives to abide intellectual stagnation or emotional and physical abuse as long as they are economically secure.10 With limited job skills or opportunities, single and divorced women fall

into exploitative financial arrangements as well, often working as domestic servants or

prostitutes.

Male modernists also investigate the economics of marriage. In Modernism’s Body: Sex,

Culture, and Joyce (1996), Christine Froula views James Joyce’s oeuvre as a cultural critique of

repressive patriarchal institutions, such as marriage, which forbid male identification with the

female and thrive on women’s subjugation. In his own life, Joyce rejected the “legal fiction” of

marriage and paternity, refusing for decades to marry Nora Barnacle or baptize his son, Giorgio

(19). He also refused to impose his surname on Giorgio, believing that “a child should be

allowed to take his father’s or mother’s name at will on coming of age” (Joyce qtd. in Froula 19).

10 Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes’ Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) discusses Hemingway’s life and fiction as constructed upon a code of economic exchange, beginning with his mother’s “model of how emotional qualities may be reduced to economic quantities” 9

Joyce therefore creates male characters whose emerging artistry compels their identification with

a lost female self. Froula references Stephen Hero, Joyce’s prototype for A Portrait of the Artist

as a Young Man (1916), to establish her thesis, stating, “Stephen scorns Emma’s subjection of

her sexuality to the ‘presumptive’ authority of Church and state through the socioeconomic

marriage system, which he views as tantamount to sanctioned prostitution” (67).

Connections between marriage, sexuality, and prostitution arise throughout modern

fiction. Female and male modernists perceive the issues differently, with men establishing a

“discourse that sexualized themselves at the expense of women’s language and sexuality”

(Kineke 281).11 As Froula acknowledges, it is easier for Stephen to defy the social system than it

is for Emma, who would incur financial devastation or a dangerous, humiliating life as a

prostitute or mistress were she to reject marriage. Joyce’s contempt for marriage stems in part from witnessing his mother’s degrading relationship with her husband. Recognizing how patriarchy victimizes women, especially in collusion with Roman Catholicism, Joyce strives to

reconfigure conventional social rites. Yet while we see Stephen (Hero and Dedalus)

purposefully “initiating himself out of rather than into his culture” (Froula, Modernism’s Body

70), female characters in modern women’s fiction require society’s acceptance lest they sink

deeper into physical and psychological misery, like Rhys’s heroines and Larsen’s Helga Crane,

in particular. Life on society’s outskirts provides little artistic fodder for such women, but fear,

sickness, and poverty instead. The bigotry of those around them contributes to their inexorable

decline.

(26). I discuss their theories more fully in reference to marital arrangements in Rhys’s Quartet and Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee. 11 In “ ‘Like a Hook Fits an Eye’: Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, and the Imperial Operations of Modernist Mentoring,” Sheila Kineke states, “Modernism as a literary period has been traditionally aligned with a few male masters,” e.g., Ford, Conrad, Lawrence, and Pound, who pathologized the female body (282, 284). 10

Modernist Color Lines

Each writer demonstrates that women’s financial circumstances hang upon hegemonic

notions of race. Clarissa and other characters in Mrs. Dalloway enjoy the spoils of British

imperialism, their material well being arising out of the oppression of others. A Member of

Parliament, Richard Dalloway outlines English colonialism abroad, while Peter Walsh spends

years as a colonial administrator in India, the professional experiences of both men complicating

their relationships with women. As Nancy Bazin explains, misogyny and colonialism go hand in

hand, as men who “think they are innately superior to women [. . .] think they are innately

superior to people of other races, religions, or nationalities” (24). Anna Morgan in Rhys’s

Voyage in the Dark, for instance, travels from her home in colonial Dominica to England only to

encounter hatred in the “real” English, who interpret her West Indian patois as a sign of an

inferior racial and class pedigree. After descending into poverty, Anna resorts to prostitution to

survive.

Gilbert and Gubar discuss embattled women of the Harlem Renaissance struggling with

African-American men and white women for social and economic equality. Fauset and Larsen’s

novels therefore distinguish women of color as “surveyed spectacles” (No Man’s Land, Vol. III

135), forced to wear masks and assume unnatural roles to appease sexist and racist notions of

African-American womanhood. Like several of her literary predecessors, Fauset posits marriage as a potential means of race work and personal fulfillment, 12 yet fraught with complications, in-

and outside the black community, for those born black and female in America. Larsen depicts to

12 Ann duCille’s The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) discusses the theme of marriage in African-American women’s literary history. Late nineteenth-century writers such as Frances Watkins Harper and Pauline Hopkins conceived of legally sanctioned marriage as “the calling card that announced the civility and democratic entitlement which they attempted to claim for themselves and the black masses they saw as their constituencies” (30). These “early black writers were less interested in scrutinizing marriage as a social relation [as does Fauset] than in claiming the marriage ideal for African Americans as a civil liberty” (144). 11

a greater extent how racial and sexual prejudice intertwine, infiltrating marriage and destroying

women of color. Money becomes a paramount concern, forcing women to choose between a

miserable but financially stable marriage or economic devastation in low-wage, degrading jobs.

Hurston and Woolf’s female characters achieve self-actualization within their marriages,

yet not before encountering fear along the way in—and of—the less privileged women and men

around them. Toni Morrison’s theory of American Africanism, that “a nonwhite, Africanlike (or

Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States” by whites to help define

themselves (Playing in the Dark 6), resonates in Hurston’s white American characters as well as

Woolf’s English ones. Capitalist, imperialist societies pit those of different classes and races

against one another, their antagonism thwarting relationships that would help eradicate prejudice.

Orientalism and postcolonial theory thus elucidate each work. In its explanation of the development, study, and perpetuation of the Western world’s notion of the Other, Edward Said’s

Orientalism (1978) is particularly relevant to my analyses, as each writer portrays the difficulty of dispelling stereotypes demeaning to women. Because they do not conform to traditional female roles of wife or mother, Rhys’s unplaceable women are despised, assumed by others to be prostitutes. Mulatta women in Fauset and Larsen meet with conflicting stereotypes of mixed- race women as more acceptable than those who are “all” black, or, conversely, as tainted by their infusion of “black blood.” Arvay Meserve displays racist attitudes toward African-Americans and European immigrants. As a white woman, Arvay may express rage against her husband and attain some semblance of power within her home only through color prejudice and xenophobia.

12

Breaking the Silence

Women in each novel suffer not just because they are poor or because they are not

“white,” but above all because they are female. Clarissa Dalloway and Arvay Meserve, for instance, enjoy material comfort in beautifully appointed homes. Nevertheless their society’s narrow expectations of womanhood traumatize them both. Rhys’s women are scorned for their unconventional lifestyles, while similarly unorthodox men are immune to censure, if not entirely accepted into mainstream society either. Mulatta and African-American women in Fauset and

Larsen must constantly combat stereotypical images of women of color as sexually depraved. In

Seraph on the Suwanee, Arvay’s subjugation within her marriage demonstrates women’s debased relationships with men regardless of race.13 The key for women to establishing their identity, and therefore more balanced marriages, lies in their discovering, or recovering, their voices.

George Steiner observes that in the works of multilingual writers such as Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, the “equation of a single pivot of language, of native deep-rootedness, with poetic authority is again in doubt” (6, emphasis added). Indeed, modernist women writers doubted years earlier a “single pivot” of male language for resulting in female wordlessness.

Woolf and Rhys’s fiction demonstrates the power of women’s silence, with characters engaging more in private reflections than in spoken communication with others. In such a manner, they may seek psychological and emotional strength free of intrusive, hostile voices. Patricia

Laurence posits the silences and narrative gaps of Woolf’s writing in particular as an active restructuring of language and literature, resulting in a “theory of mind” more revelatory of human nature than spoken dialogue (60). Diane Filby Gillespie points to Woolf’s ambivalence 13

toward silence, which “suggests death” and so “also stops words, imposes silence” (74). Above

all, however, Woolf remains convinced that “Something essential in the human experience

transcends words” (Gillespie 76).

Conversely, bell hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) enjoins

African-American women to achieve consciousness-raising through writing but primarily

through speech. The imposed silences upon people of color have thwarted their self-realization

and robbed them of community and cultural pride, hooks believes. Black women must refuse

voicelessness and speak out in their efforts to attain selfhood. The “liberatory voice,” she writes,

“will necessarily confront, disturb, demand that listeners even alter ways of hearing and being”

(16). Her rejection of silence echoes Carolyn Heilbrun’s lament in Writing a Woman’s Life

(1988) that so few substantial women’s biographies and autobiographies exist because women

telling the story of their own lives have no models or freedom of expression. Woolf, Rhys,

Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston variously oppose the silencing of women in their novels, from

Clarissa’s rich inner life in Mrs. Dalloway to Arvay’s patronization of her husband at the conclusion of Seraph.

Chapters

My first chapter concerns Mrs. Dalloway. The earliest published novel among those in my study, it lays the foundation for many of the issues at play in the texts that follow. Woolf realized her vision of modern narrative in the character of Clarissa Dalloway, introduced ten years earlier in her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). Mapping Clarissa’s development in

Voyage, the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923), and Mrs. Dalloway, I highlight

13 Another theoretical work informing my research is M. M. Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin’s theory that “verbal discourse is a social phenomenon” (259) coalesces well with the linguistic and cultural dislocation 14

Woolf’s conviction that negotiating modernity requires an exploratory yet protected consciousness for married women. Clarissa is unafraid to face painful thoughts, in solitude or among crowds, thereby embracing her myriad experiences as a woman. Through memory and association, she draws the disparate people and phases of her life into a cohesive personal narrative. Her life with her husband Richard has its problems, and certainly bears the pressure of society’s conventional expectations of marriage and married women. Yet by achieving a balance between extremes— Septimus Warren Smith’s acute sensitivity and his wife Rezia’s resolve to keep emotion at bay— Clarissa is able to cultivate her identity while strengthening her bond with

Richard.

Chapter two considers marriage in Jean Rhys’s early novels, which depict the shattered psyches of women restricted from so-called respectable society. Born into an Anglo family on

Dominica, Rhys found herself in England at age 18 without family or finances. Her long life on society’s outskirts compelled works fiercely critical of England’s scorn of nonconformists and the poor. Her novels portray marriage as incapable of safeguarding women unable or unwilling to fulfill the role of proper British matron. Rather than improve women’s lives, marriage alienates them even further from themselves and others, especially their families and soon- absconded husbands. While Clarissa Dalloway recalls with honesty the painful or embarrassing moments in her life, Rhys’s women distort their memories, prohibiting their reconciliation with the past and ability to move beyond it. Their psychological trauma combined with their poverty leads to their physical decline, in turn eliciting disgust from others, engendering even greater, more prolonged isolation. Caught in a vicious circle, Rhys’s women cannot locate a self; her novels demand a new society in which a woman’s value is not yoked to her marital or sexual status.

explored by modern writers. 15

Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, discussed in

chapter three, similarly explore the connection between women’s psychological and physical

states. In their novels, women of color contend with conflicting ideologies of African-American

womanhood, at times taking advantage of their light skin to subvert bigotry and maneuver within

white society. Unlike Clarissa Dalloway and Rhys’s heroines, however, African-American and

mulatta women in the works of Fauset and Larsen are never left to their own devices to try to

establish their selfhood. Rather, they face an onslaught of assumptions and biases from others

about black female identity. Plum Bun therefore reworks traditional women’s roles to

investigate the confluence of sexism and racism in American society. Larsen’s novels portray

society’s disdain for women of color but especially for those of mixed race. In Europe or

America, in the urban North or rural South, passing as white or living as black, married or single,

Larsen’s characters suffer the consequences of trying to bridge adverse worlds. Female

characters in all three novels reflect important Harlem Renaissance concerns as well, including

the means of racial uplift, the purpose of literature, and “authentic” African-American artistic

expression. Above all they demonstrate the multiple identities forced upon women of color by

mainstream white environs.

My fourth chapter examines Zora Neale Hurston’s last published novel, Seraph on the

Suwanee. Shifting in focus from the racism and intraracial color prejudice experienced by

African-American women, the novel investigates sexism and classism within a white rural setting. Long considered Hurston’s desertion of African-American subjects, the novel in fact addresses issues found throughout her writing, such as how marriage threatens women’s selfhood, sexual violence as a tool of oppression, and the connection between misogyny and racism, including white women’s exploitation of patriarchy at black women’s expense. Tracing 16

the tempestuous marriage of a white Florida couple, Seraph begins with Jim Meserve’s rape of

his fiancée, Arvay. The rape is the defining moment of Arvay’s life, a recurring event in her

marriage, and the novel’s prevailing image, illustrating Hurston’s views on gender and race

relations in the mid-twentieth-century, a politically active period in her life. Masking herself at

the novel’s conclusion, Arvay demonstrates another means by which subordinated women might

find a voice. A materially well-off white woman fearing the dissolution of her identity, Arvay,

like Clarissa Dalloway, reaches selfhood through introspection and the courage to confront her past.

With marriage as their subject, Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston explore the

problems of identity formation unique to women, American and British, white and black. Their

novels’ complex narrative consciousnesses, conflicted characters, critiques of society, and

indeterminate conclusions interrogate the possibility of “ourselves as subjects with knowable

essences” (Hutcheon 21), particularly when the subject is a married woman. The narrative

condition in each novel becomes “open, unending, unresolved” (Jackson 125), with traditional

rites such as marriage exposed as volatile for women. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf ponders

“the conditions in which women lived” to determine the type of fiction they might have

produced, for “fiction is like a spider’s web,” she writes, “attached ever so lightly perhaps, but

still attached to life at all four corners [. . .] and attached to grossly material things, like health

and money and the houses we live in” (43-44). As each writer demonstrates, the spiritual and

material are linked for married women. For the disparate parts of their lives to comprise an

identity depends upon their unique female voices ringing out. 17

Chapter One: Clarissa Dalloway’s Modern Marriage

In Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Rachel Vinrace reflects upon her

relationship with her aunt, Helen Ambrose. Eager to know each other yet tentative as to how,

they struggle to achieve a meaningful connection. “Her efforts to come to an understanding had

only hurt her aunt’s feelings,” Rachel thinks, “and the conclusion must be that it is better not to

try. To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel

strongly perhaps but differently” (Voyage Out 36). The link between fervent human emotion and

an abyss—a fall into nothingness—points toward Woolf’s theme in her fourth novel, Mrs.

Dalloway. As Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith contend with their socially and

psychologically intense worlds, they devise methods for avoiding the abyss that resound most

profoundly in their marriages. Clarissa and her husband Richard, and Septimus and his wife

Lucrezia strive for psychological autonomy without becoming isolated, for a union with their

spouse that does not subsume them. While Clarissa is generally viewed as a mirror image of

Septimus,1 I see her as a mediating figure between him, ravaged by hypersensitivity, and Rezia,

determined to keep emotions at bay. In her marriage to Richard, Clarissa balances between the

two extremes, reflecting Woolf’s conviction that negotiating modernity entails an exploratory yet carefully guarded consciousness for married women.

1 On June 19, 1923, Woolf writes, “In this book [Mrs. Dalloway] I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity” by contrasting Clarissa with Septimus. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1920- 1924, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1978) 248. Susan Dick describes the novel as a “series of moments in the narrative that link Clarissa with Septimus, whom she never meets and who is intended, Woolf said in her 1928 introduction to the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway, to be Clarissa’s ‘double.’” Susan Dick, “Literary Realism in Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves,” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 53. Woolf’s Modern Library introduction states, “Of Mrs. Dalloway then one can only bring to light at the moment a 18

The Evolution of Clarissa

The Voyage Out enables a discussion of marriage and Mrs. Dalloway as the first of

Woolf’s forays into the characters of Clarissa and Richard. The couple appears in its early

chapters as travelers aboard the Euphrosyne, Rachel’s father’s ship, en route to South America.

On board for just a few days, they leave a strong impression on the other passengers, particularly

Rachel. They are an attractive couple, unselfconsciously bearing a sense of entitlement due to their wealth, Clarissa’s father’s peerage, and Richard’s former membership in Parliament.

Disgruntled at having to stop mid-route to pick them up, Captain Vinrace considers the

Dalloways manipulative and overconfident in their right to “have what they like for the asking”

(Voyage 38). They are linked together from the start, equally invested in maintaining the privileges of upper-class Britons despite—indeed because of—their relegation to the “separate spheres so crucial to the marriage plot” (Froula, “Chrysalis” 71). The Dalloways embody patriarchal codes of man- and womanhood. Because females are both perceived and “instituted as subjects who are closer to nature” than to culture, their initiation into adulthood effects their

“absence from the culture of the public sphere, which becomes ‘male’” (Froula, “Chrysalis” 65).

Clarissa is a housewife and socialite, elegantly white-haired, pink-cheeked, and beautifully dressed. Richard is a politician, handsome, tall, and hale. Both captivate Rachel, who, motherless from a young age, has rarely seen a married couple, let alone one so striking.

Rachel listens raptly as Clarissa holds court on deck, maintaining the flow of

conversation on topics meant to elevate the mind and ensure everyone’s comfort. Should a

contentious issue arise, she defers to her husband, including his belief that women’s suffrage is

an abomination. Alone in their cabin, Clarissa and Richard talk about the other passengers, “a

few scraps, of little importance or none perhaps; as that in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence.” Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: The Modern Library, 1928) vi. 19

set of cranks,” she calls them (Voyage 50). Unnerved to be so far from England, Richard draws

upon visions of “English history, King following King, Prime Minster Prime Minister, and Law

Law” (Voyage 50), while Clarissa chatters on. She too thinks wistfully of England, particularly

how dreadful it would be not to be English. She tells her husband, the penultimate Englishman,

that he is better than she is—stable, while she is subject to many different moods. She is

disingenuous, however, or possessed of little self-awareness, as her moods throughout The

Voyage Out are actually quite static and placid. She takes a polite interest in the families and hobbies of those on board. Seasick, she remains mindful of her manners and appearance. She offers Rachel motherly advice on living life to the fullest, ideally with an exacting husband. As

Christine Froula explains, “Clarissa invites Rachel into conventional womanhood” (“Chrysalis”

71).

Amid Mrs. Dalloway’s facile comments lie glimmers of the profounder Clarissa to come.

She finds beauty in supposedly “snuffy old” lives, privileging the regular, plodding populace over the “poets whom every one worships, just because they’re geniuses and die young” (Voyage

58). She also tells Rachel that Richard satisfies her in part because he is “man and woman” at once (Voyage 61). Both comments portend not only the development of the character of

Clarissa, capable of finding significance in everyday events, but also the creation of Septimus, the doomed young poet unable to fulfill his proscribed gender role. Nor will the Clarissa of Mrs.

Dalloway disparage a person’s early fall into the abyss.

In The Voyage Out, however, she is yet frivolous, modeled on Kitty Maxse, an aristocratic friend of Woolf’s half-sister, Stella Duckworth, and later, her sister Vanessa.2 Kitty was a fascinating figure to Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, emblematic of the upper-crust society

2 Hermione Lee references Kitty as “chaperone and mentor to the young Stephen girls.” Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Knopf, 1997) 98. 20

that both attracted and repelled them. 3 In a diary entry of September 1920, Woolf mentions with

pleasure that her friend Lytton Strachey was especially impressed with The Voyage Out’s “satire

of the Dalloways” (Diary II 65). She also writes to Vanessa that the character of Clarissa “is

almost Kitty verbatim” (Hussey, A-Z 156). In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee describes

Kitty Maxse as “a sharp-edged, elegant woman, blonde and blue-eyed, who liked to talk politics,

played the piano well, and was full of social graces and opinionated energy, which Virginia

caricatured” as early as 1907 (160). Yet in October 1922, news of Kitty’s death unsettles Woolf,

although by that time the women had not seen each other for fourteen years. In particular Woolf

is haunted by the manner in which she dies: “Kitty fell,” Woolf writes, “very mysteriously, over

some bannisters” (Diary II 208). She suspected the death was a suicide and regretted having

severed their ties years before.4

The account of Kitty’s demise echoes another diary entry of June 1920, which records an

incident Woolf hears from Vanessa of a young man’s death at a party. He had been sitting on a

rooftop talking with a woman, when for some reason, perhaps a loss of balance or misjudgment

of distance, he tumbled over the edge and landed on the ground thirty feet below. “He died in

the ambulance that fetched him,” Woolf notes (Diary II 50). Disturbing to her as the death itself

are the callous reactions of the other guests. “No one was upset; some telephoned for news of

other dances” (Diary II 50). Even the man’s father and stepmother express little concern when

called to the scene. “A strange event,” writes Woolf, “to come to a dance among strangers &

3 See Hermione Lee (Virginia Woolf), Sonya Rudikoff, Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy (Palo Alto: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1999), and George Spater and Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woolf (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977) for discussions of the Victorian customs maintained by the Bloomsbury Group. 4 Lee 161. Also see Woolf’s letter of October 22, 1922, to Roger Fry, in which she writes, “there’s Kitty Maxse, falling over the bannisters and killing herself—ought one to write to Susan Lushington [her sister]? No, one would say the wrong thing. Still it seems a pity that Kitty did kill herself: but of course she was an awful snob.” Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1912-1922, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) 574. 21

die—to come dressed in evening clothes, & then for it all to be over, instantly, so senselessly”

(Diary II 50). Woolf’s private reflections will return in Mrs. Dalloway’s linked episodes of parties, falling, and death.

The Voyage Out’s opening chapters provide their own drama in a storm at sea that levels

the ship’s passengers and elicits their best and worst, particularly regarding Rachel. Enamored

of Mrs. Dalloway, she feels intimidated by Richard but intrigued by his self-assurance and, in her

eyes, commanding knowledge of world affairs. His vanity awakened, he denigrates her verbally,

saying a woman’s place is out of politics and in the home, and physically, seizing and kissing her

roughly one day in his cabin. His earlier passionate kissing of his wife becomes tainted the

moment he exploits Rachel’s vulnerability, belying Clarissa’s claim that he is man and woman

together, seemingly strong, kind, and sensitive. Helen Ambrose sees him for the pompous man

that he is, yet prefers his conversation to the vacuous ramblings of Clarissa. When the

Dalloways disembark, everyone on board heaves a collective sigh, their sense of loss stemming

from no deep affection for the couple but from regret that a welcome break in their routine has

come to an end. If the Dalloways’ primary purpose in The Voyage Out is to enlarge upon

Rachel’s character,5 they nevertheless linger in Woolf’s imagination, reappearing in several short

stories as Mrs. Dalloway takes shape in her mind.

Also taking shape is Woolf’s concept of modern narrative. The Voyage Out and her next novel, Night and Day (1919), adhere to conventional tenets of fiction in straightforward plots with chronological series of events. Dissatisfied with such a method, Woolf expresses the desire for a greater evocation of human consciousness. She comes to reject the Victorian narrative stance of authors such as Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy, mentioning them by name in her essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1923) and “Modern Fiction” (1925) as 22

Edwardians whose novels fail to represent human nature. She lauds her contemporaries,

Georgian writers including James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster, for breaking with

their predecessors and venturing into unknown territory. No longer slaves to traditional concepts

of plot and character, she writes, modern writers delve into the far more interesting and

important “dark places of psychology” (“Modern Fiction” 156). Written shortly after her third

novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), which displays her newfound fragmentary style in a story of the

generation obliterated by war, Woolf’s essays call for further narrative innovation.

A 1921 conversation with Maynard Keynes about Night and Day exemplifies her

developing technique.6 “Oh its [sic] a dull book, I know, I said,” she records in her diary; “but

don’t you see you must put it all in before you can leave it out” (Diary II 121). Clarissa

Dalloway in The Voyage Out, then, is a chatterbox whose subordination to her husband renders

her laughable, at least to some on board ship, such as Helen. Woolf delves deeper into her

character in a short story of 1922, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” published in The Dial in July

1923 and in a sequence of stories entitled Mrs. Dalloway’s Party in 1973.7 Woolf originally

intended her vignette of a woman shopping on a June morning in London to be the first chapter

of a new novel. Of the early Clarissa sketches, “Bond Street” indeed resembles most closely the opening pages of Mrs. Dalloway. As Clarissa embarks on her errands in the earlier story, she thinks with nostalgia of her youth, heeds the tolling of Big Ben, and considers the grief of those who lost sons in the war. Trying on gloves, she considers the shop woman—her finances, her probable vacation destinations —with a fair amount of condescension, for despite her more

5 David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (New York: New Directions, 1963) 11. 6 Economist John Maynard Keynes was an original member of the Bloomsbury Group, at one point sharing a house with Woolf and her brother Adrian. (Information on various Bloomsbury figures and friends of Virginia Woolf comes from Mark Hussey’s invaluable resource, Virginia Woolf A-Z (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 7 The seven stories in Mrs. Dalloway’s Party were gathered together and published by Stella McNichol, who views them as integral not only to Woolf’s creation of the novel Mrs. Dalloway, but also to her “preoccupation with a 23

expansive consciousness, she is still primarily “an adornment of civilization” (Froula,

“Chrysalis” 66). Most importantly, Woolf depicts character in the story through interior

narrative rather than dialogue.

“The New Dress,” also written in 1922 and included in the 1973 publication, similarly

relates to Mrs. Dalloway. While in “Bond Street” Clarissa prepares for her party that evening,

“The New Dress” concerns one of her guests, a woman who arrives at the Dalloways’ house and

feels ashamed of her unfashionable attire. Here Woolf considers the emotions arising out of the

mundane act of attending a party. She broaches the idea in The Voyage Out, as several women

on Santa Marina discover they have a common acquaintance in a Mrs. Raymond Parry (Parry

becomes Clarissa’s maiden name in Mrs. Dalloway). “Mrs. Parry’s drawing-room, though

thousands of miles away, behind a vast curve of water on a tiny piece of earth, came before their

eyes. They who had had no solidity or anchorage before seemed to be attached to it somehow [. .

.]; perhaps they had passed each other on the stairs” (Voyage 147). Suddenly their hostess

assumes a new significance in having drawn them together, first at her party and later on the

island.

In “The New Dress,” Mabel Waring finds no such kinship, but stands alone and reflects

with bitterness on the poverty that compelled her to make rather than buy her dress. She also

recalls the numerous other failures of her life, particularly her marriage. Yet she remembers fleeting moments of happiness, too, “when she said to herself (for she would never say this to anybody else), ‘This is it. This has happened. This is it!’” (Mrs. Dalloway’s Party 64) Both early works contain elements of Woolf’s tunneling process, telling “the past by instalments [sic], as I have need of it” (Diary II 272), a process that reaches fruition in Mrs. Dalloway. Stream of

particular social occasion, the party” (9). Stella McNichol, ed. Mrs. Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence by Virginia Woolf (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). 24

consciousness, moments of epiphany, and the psychic interconnections among strangers in Mrs.

Dalloway’s Party build upon the experimentation of Jacob’s Room. Developing Clarissa

Dalloway compels Woolf’s reinvention of narrative until she locates an expression of modern

consciousness in the fully realized Clarissa.

Clarissa Modernized

In The Voyage Out Clarissa is an extension of her husband; in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond

Street,” Richard is far less consequential. By Mrs. Dalloway, the couple has achieved an

equitable if complex marriage. As Woolf shapes Clarissa into a more nuanced figure over the

years, she transforms Richard from a robust man into the seemingly unremarkable Mr. Dalloway

of the novel. Although made thirty years beforehand, Clarissa’s decision to marry Richard

drives the story, much as literary history compels modern narrative.8 Peter Walsh and Sally

Seton, lovers from Clarissa’s youth at her party that evening, consider the Dalloway marriage

wholly unsuited to the Clarissa they remember. Reflecting on her rejection of them years ago,

they misconstrue her now and criticize what they perceive as her hackneyed life. Clarissa has

not suffered the obliteration of her character, however, as the novel’s title might imply and as her

friends believe, but has preserved her selfhood and ensured her psychological survival in modern

England.

8 Carol T. Christ’s “Modernism and Anti-Victorianism” considers the work of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, yet bears relevance to Woolf’s modernism as well. Theorizing modern poetry as a “strenuous activity of re- combination, of re-experience” that both rejects and rehearses its Victorian predecessors, Christ explicates Woolf’s developing narrative technique along with characters in Mrs. Dalloway, who claim to have done with the past even while repeatedly reliving it. Carol T. Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 146. 25

A 1921 diary entry explicates Woolf’s vision of Clarissa’s decision. Writing of Ralph

Partridge’s marriage proposal to Dora Carrington,9 she says:

By this time I think Carrington will have made up her mind one way or t’other.

She must have had an odious Sunday. But still she must make up her mind. So

I told Ralph on Friday, broaching the topic after all those months of silence. He did

it himself, rather, by telling me of his gloom of the night before: his loneliness. [. . .] He

was very shrewd & bitter about C. [. . .] So people in love always turn & rend the loved,

with considerable insight too. He was speaking the truth largely. But I expect he was

biassed [sic]; & also I expect--& indeed told him—that he is a bit of an ogre & tyrant.

He wants more control than I should care to give—control I mean of the body & mind

& time & thoughts of his loved. There’s his danger & her risk; so I don’t much envy

her making up her mind this wet Whit Sunday. (Diary II 118)

Faced with a similar dilemma as a young woman at her family country home, Bourton, Clarissa

chooses the conventional Richard over the impassioned Peter and Sally, perhaps reflecting

Carolyn Heilbrun’s claim that “Marriage to a lover is fatal; lovers are not husbands. More

important, husbands are not lovers. The compulsion to find a lover and a husband in a single

person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion” (Writing a Woman’s Life 87).

Whether something is lost between the couple aboard the Euphrosyne, who gossip and kiss in

their cabin, to the one in Mrs. Dalloway, who keep separate bedrooms and rarely verbalize their

9 Ralph Partridge assisted Virginia and Leonard Woolf at their Hogarth Press from 1920 to 1923, often dismaying them with his erratic behavior and tumultuous personal life. He married artist Dora Carrington in 1921. 26

feelings, Woolf answers with a narrative reflecting the pressures exerted upon modernist

sensibilities. Paramount among them is the intrusion of past events into the present.

Clarissa’s “safe but unexciting marriage to safe but unexciting Richard” (Jackson 122) affords her the physical and psychological space crucial to achieving autonomy. Chatting with

Richard the afternoon of the party, abiding his solicitous concern for her health, watching him leave for work, Clarissa considers the “dignity between people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf” necessary for “one’s independence, one’s self-respect— something, after all, priceless” (Mrs. Dalloway 132). Yet Clarissa does pay a price. With Richard’s busy schedule, the couple rarely see each other during the day, while at night they retreat to separate bedrooms, he to the second floor of the house, she to a space in the attic. Often away until late at night, Richard had “insisted, after her illness, that she must sleep undisturbed. And really she preferred to read [. . .]. He knew it” (MD 35). It is unclear whether Richard suggests the attic room out of deference to his wife’s health or a sense that she would rather be alone. Either way, the room provides Clarissa with a space for self-reflection that ultimately strengthens her and her marriage.

Clarissa enjoys her morning of errands, strolling through London, talking with shopkeepers, regarding the crowded city streets and feeling part of a whole. She reflects on her love of and sensitivity toward people, even if only encountered briefly in a shop. She focuses on

“this, here, now, in front of her” (MD 11), yet returning home she is crushed to learn that Lady

Bruton has invited Richard to lunch, but not her. Ascending to her attic room, she feels

“suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless” (MD 35), her sense of loss growing as she enters her room, with its narrow bed and white sheets. Her devastation seems excessive given the nature of the event; Lady Bruton’s is a business lunch, after all, not a social affair, and the two women 27

hardly know each other. Her despair comes from being considered superfluous to the business of

the outside world, a far cry from Clarissa of The Voyage Out, careful never to interfere in her husband’s professional life. Rejected by another woman who chooses Richard instead, Clarissa

of Mrs. Dalloway reenacts her own rejection of past lovers, fearing she lacks “something central

which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces” (MD 36), just as Sally, later that

night, critiques Clarissa’s failings.

“Lovely in girlhood,” Clarissa thinks of herself, “suddenly there came a moment—for example on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden—when, through some contraction of this cold spirit, she had failed [Richard]” (MD 36). She is not cold, however, only sexually unresponsive to Richard at certain moments. In a society appalled by women who fail to fulfill its expectations, she comes to believe in her own heterosexual inadequacy. Patriarchy deems women such as Clarissa “frigid.” In another realm, she would be lauded for finding alternate outlets for her sexuality,10 including memories of Sally Seton, her girlhood friend with whom she

once shared a kiss, the “most exquisite moment of her whole life” (MD 40). Although she

“resents” her irrepressible affection for women, she “could not resist sometimes yielding” to it

by reanimating past scenes with Sally and permitting herself feelings of warmth toward other

females (MD 36). Aging women inspire terror in the heroines of Jean Rhys’s early novels. In

Mrs. Dalloway, conversely, Clarissa feels compassion toward an old woman visible in the

window opposite hers. Alone in her attic, Clarissa feels simultaneously “[l]ike a nun

withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower” (MD 35), her movement away from Richard leading

10 Regarding assumptions of Woolf’s frigidity, Hermione Lee writes, “in the years when Virginia Stephen was being set up as a virginal ice-maiden, she expressed strong sensual demands and susceptibilities. Talk and petting, thought and writing, were powerful sources of excitement. Her eroticism expressed itself not as ‘copulation,’ but as demands for comfort and admiration [. . .]. She had a sensual imagination [. . .]. And her writing, while evasive and indirect about the sexual lives of her characters [. . .] is full of intensely dramatised sensual feeling. No ‘gropings or grapplings,’ certainly, but her translation of perceptions and emotions into concentrated moments of physical 28

her toward introspection and self-discovery. Like the space made famous in A Room of One’s

Own, Clarissa’s room too denotes “freedom of mind, independence of property and body from fathers and husbands, professors and judges, all men of power and wealth who would tell a woman what to do” (Alexander 275).

As Clarissa embraces both joyous and painful memories in solitude, she exemplifies how the past assumes importance only in light of what follows it.11 It is in retrospect, after

experiencing sexual disappointment with Richard, that Clarissa appreciates the magnitude of her

and Sally’s relationship. Having extinguished it upon her marriage, Clarissa rekindles it

repeatedly through her new, more enlightened understanding of its significance.12 Her sense of

loneliness does not mean her marriage is a failure. Rather it illustrates the “ambiguities and

equivocations” in all of Virginia Woolf’s works (Caughie 10), which reject binaries by knitting

together seemingly contradictory elements. The Dalloways demonstrate the potential to change

society, for they have already changed one of its oldest rites, marriage. They enact a “movement

away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles

and the modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen” (Heilbrun, Androgyny ix-x). The

heightened consciousness Clarissa achieves in her marriage demonstrates how society might

change were more people willing to reject conventional mores.

response has its own eroticism—as (famously) in Clarissa Dalloway’s attempt to describe her occasional feelings for women” (Virginia Woolf 240). 11 Perry Meisel explains deferred action in The Myth of the Modern: A Study in British Literature and Criticism after 1850 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1987): “The primary event is known not despite but because of the distortion through which it appears afterward. [. . .] There is, properly speaking, no objective or original event as such [. . .], only its (re)construction through the rhetoric of narrative or memory” (28). 12 “Over and over again in Mrs. Dalloway we are brought into a condition of narrative anxiety or tension, never to have it released in an ending. The opening of the ‘present’ of Clarissa’s story at once opens onto the earlier, Bourton plot. We quickly realize that earlier story, though formally ended with a marriage, has not really ended in Clarissa’s mind.” Tony Jackson, The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) 122. 29

By marrying Richard, Clarissa resists the absorption of her will into a man’s as well as its

coercion into a similarly unsettling stance with women. Her choices have been viewed as a

respectable suicide,13 juxtaposed as she is with Septimus Warren Smith throughout the novel.

With Richard as her partner, however, she cultivates a psyche able to overcome the impulses that

drive Septimus toward death. Although she sometimes wonders who “Mrs. Richard Dalloway”

is, her identity remains intact: everyone calls her Clarissa. Thus “marriage to Richard is not

really a betrayal of self so much as a compact between two people to live together and allow the

soul a little breathing space” (Zwerdling 140).14 As Woolf found contentedness somehow

unsatisfactory, so do her fictional characters.15 Clarissa transforms the tension into

psychological vigor. When they arrive at her party, Peter and Sally construe her breezy affection

toward them as the superficial put-on of a hostess. On the contrary, she is sincere, for by

rehearsing the past earlier that day, she reaffirms and revives her selfhood. By the time her party

is in full swing, she has achieved her modern moment, having acknowledged the past, released it,

and prepared herself for what may come. Marriage to Richard enables her to complete, and

repeat, the process.

Mr. Dalloway in Westminster

Richard Dalloway is an elusive character in the novel, seen primarily, and usually judged

harshly, through other people’s eyes. When Peter visits Clarissa in the morning, he holds

13 Emily Jensen, “Clarissa Dalloway’s Respectable Suicide,” Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) 162-179. 14 Robert Kiely notes that in naming her novel Mrs. Dalloway, as opposed to using just a first name, such as Clarissa, Pamela, Romola, Evelina, Emma, Shirley, and Amelia, Woolf “breaks an old tradition and advertises the fact that the exchange [from being single to married] has already taken place. Like Joyce and Lawrence, she has little interest in presenting marriage as a final solution to life or as a convenient stopping point for narrative fiction.” Robert Kiely, “A Long Event of Perpetual Change,” Major Literary Characters: Clarissa Dalloway, ed. Harold Bloom (New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990) 137-8. 30

Richard accountable for her seemingly wasted life, thinking, “here she’s been sitting all the time

I’ve been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties [. . .]; and having a

Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard” (MD 46). He finds Richard a plain,

unimaginative politician, even selecting an alternative career for him: a countryman, given his

way with animals. He recalls the day at Bourton when Richard treated an injured dog, a

masterful display of control, he remembers thinking, in which Richard established the hierarchy

between himself and Clarissa. Speaking “to the dog as if it were a human being” and telling

Clarissa to “fetch” as if she were a dog (MD 84, 83), Richard reveals a bullying side of which

Peter wholly approves. The next moment, he envisions Richard as the dog, on hind legs telling

them all that “no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at

keyholes [. . .]. No decent man ought to let his wife visit a deceased wife’s sister” (MD 84).16

Peter finds Clarissa’s subservience to Richard absurd, forgetting his own unsuccessful demand that she surrender her will to his.

“With twice his wits,” Peter thinks, Clarissa “had to see things through his eyes—one of

the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she must always be quoting Richard” (MD

86). And yet Clarissa does not quote Richard; in fact he seems to quote her. While Peter detests

Clarissa’s proprietary attitude toward her daughter, Richard expresses it, too. They echo each other, suggesting an unbreakable bond forged through their child. Regarding the psychologist

Sir William Bradshaw warily at her party, Clarissa recalls visiting his practice one afternoon and the immense relief she felt upon leaving. Although she cannot pinpoint why she dislikes him,

15 In a diary entry of May 5, 1920, Woolf writes, “Content is disillusioning to behold: what is there to be content about?” (Diary II 34). 16 Woolf’s reference to dogs, Kathy J. Phillips explains, “may gain some of its indignity from Dr. Johnson’s comment that women preaching are like dogs walking on their hind legs, a slur to which Woolf frequently alludes (Voyage 292; Jacob 32-33; Room of One’s Own 56).” Kathy J. Phillips, Virginia Woolf Against Empire (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994) 16. 31

“Richard agreed with her” (MD 201). In several instances, she voices an opinion and Richard

concurs, not the other way around, as Peter believes.

Sally also believes Clarissa and Richard are mismatched. Unlike Peter, though, she harbors no jealousy toward Richard, just disappointment in his predictable, conventional life.

Both she and Peter recall his ludicrous indoctrination into their summer enclave, when Clarissa mistakenly called him Wickham, and he shouted, “My name is Dalloway!” Sally’s subsequent mocking of him angers Clarissa and prompts the disintegration of their friendship. Both Peter and Sally presume Richard draws the worst from Clarissa—the hostess, the snob, the conventional thinker forgetful of her friends. Lady Bruton, on a different, less personal footing with the Dalloways, blames Clarissa for Richard’s lackluster career.

Richard seems to others a stodgy old dullard, at worst self-righteous and authoritarian.

To his credit, he recognizes such traits in himself when he is alone, with no risk of detection.

More often he suppresses uncomfortable, unorthodox thoughts for the easier pose of English decorum. Dining with a business associate, Hugh Whitbread, at Lady Bruton’s home, he contemplates his hostess’s ancestry in “romantic views about well-set-up old women of pedigree” (MD 116), effigies of English history. Proud to be British, like Richard in The Voyage

Out, he means, “whenever he had a moment of leisure, to write a history of Lady Bruton’s family” (MD 122). He laughs when Hugh expresses compassion toward others and disregards victims of government actions. In an ornate dining room, surrounded by portraits of generals and admirals, outlining, via Hugh’s trusty pen, the means of English colonialism in Canada,

Richard exemplifies the coldhearted governing class. Walking through London, he takes mental notes on courses of action that might eradicate the city’s problems. Yet eyeing a beggar woman lying on the street, he approaches and smiles lasciviously at her, sensing “a spark between them” 32

(MD 129). Empowered to enact change, Richard upholds convention in predatory male behavior

degrading to women.17

Internally, Richard behaves differently. Hearing from Hugh that Peter Walsh is in town,

he feels “genuinely glad” (MD 118), and later heartily welcomes Peter to the party. Peter’s early

love for Clarissa still bothers him, though, and so he resolves to tell Clarissa he loves her as soon

as he gets home. Buying flowers for her, he views their failure to discuss Peter as “the greatest

mistake in the world,” and that “it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels” (MD 127,

128)— thoughts belying Peter and Sally’s impression of him as unfeeling. In fact he and

Clarissa discuss Peter quite often, as she continually reassures Richard that she has never

regretted her choice. Without obsessing over the past, he acknowledges it and allows it to arouse

dormant emotions.

The picture of deference and cordiality at Lady Bruton’s house, Richard lets down his guard upon leaving it, harboring thoughts and criticisms that would astonish his hostess if she heard them. He is weary of patronizing the likes of her and Hugh, and feels the detritus of

London’s streets encroaching upon him. At a jewelry store with Hugh, who stops to buy a present for his wife Evelyn, he considers the shop’s items “wreckage” and “coloured paste,” and feels “stark with the lethargy of the old, stiff with the rigidity of the old, looking in” (MD 125).

He suppresses a yawn, cares not a “straw what became of Emigration” (MD 125), and is aghast to watch the clerk abide Hugh’s boorish behavior. Wondering whether he should pick something up for Clarissa, he dismisses the idea, still smarting from the fact that she has never worn a bracelet he once gave her. (If he fails to adorn his wife successfully, however, he succeeds with another female, his daughter, who appears at the party that night in a necklace he had bought for her.)

17 Phillips 20. 33

Heading home, Richard anticipates a romantic interlude with his wife, but realizes he can

only express his love “in so many words,” a much-repeated phrase reflecting the nature of their

relationship. Fully indoctrinated into British patriarchy, Richard has “developed a language

through which his thoughts and actions are predictably and safely channeled” (Kiely 143).

Because he suppresses his more volatile feelings, he hands Clarissa the bouquet without a word.

The inability to express emotions aloud is a recurring theme in Mrs. Dalloway, a novel of lapsed

communication and private thoughts that ponder and often misconstrue what other people say,

who other people are. The problem affects people of all ages, for even the younger generation at

Clarissa’s party “never had very much to say in any circumstances” (MD 194).18 Despite their colorful clothes, loud music, and boisterous parties, “the young people could not talk [. . .] the enormous resources of the English language, the power it bestows, after all, of communicating feelings [. . .] was not for them” (MD 195). Nor is it for the older generation, for Richard is incapable of expressing his emotions to Clarissa.

Taking the roses from him, she nevertheless “understood; she understood without his speaking” (MD 130), indicating the unspoken language that often develops between married couples. Writing to Violet Dickinson in 1912, Virginia Woolf mentions the “secret” languages of her youth and her “perception that identity was made explicit through language, and identification with a social group was expressed by means of speech communities” (Rudikoff

115). Woolf thus conceives of silence, particularly among repressed Britons, “as an idea, as a response to life” rather than “an ‘emptiness’ dependent on the notion of lack or absence”

18 In a diary entry of January 24, 1920, Woolf says that a party she attended was “[n]ot a human festival at all. Everyone smiling. As they could scarcely express their pleasure in words this was a necessary device” (Diary II 11). 34

(Laurence 33). In fact she asserts the communicative power of silence in all her novels.19

Perhaps Clarissa and Richard would be happier if they could talk with each other more openly.

Because they cannot, they structure their marriage around “wordless communications” (Laurence

43) that occasionally go astray but often succeed in conveying understanding and passion. In turn, Richard and especially Clarissa cultivate “interior texts” (Kiely 144) that enrich their relationship.

When Richard does talk, he appears the kinder and more compassionate of the two. He is

more tolerant of their daughter’s relationship with her tutor, Miss Kilman, and the only person to

speak that night to Ellie Henderson, standing awkward and alone. Like others in the novel, he is

a multidimensional character whose spoken words inadequately represent his thoughts. “If she

worried about these parties,” he thinks, as he and Clarissa review the guest list together, “he

would not let her give them” (MD 132). Rising, he announces he must leave for a committee

meeting, but not before insisting that she rest after lunch, per the doctor’s instructions. While it

appears that “even Dalloway can invoke the inherent authority of the exacting husband” (Schlack

57), for Clarissa feels “desperately unhappy” as she lies down (MD 133), he merely utters the

conventional words expected of a doting husband. The couple’s marriage, “while not ecstatic, is

not depicted as oppressive or unhappy. Richard Dalloway is not shown to be a particularly

interesting husband, but he is not possessive enough to keep Clarissa from doing largely as she

pleases” (Kiely 138). Her despair comes from feeling that Richard does not take her party

seriously. If that is true, he nevertheless complies with her desire to have it. He says to himself,

not to her, that he should put a stop to it.

19 Patricia Ondek Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 35

It is not Richard who threatens the Dalloway marriage, but those on the outside looking

in. Clarissa’s ability to make her own decisions is impugned by Peter and Sally’s censure. Her

resiliency lies in welcoming them into her home but declining to become involved in their

criticisms and judgment. Her old friends know she “did not marry for standard romantic love,

but misunderstand her actual motives” (Littleton 46), motives reflecting a healthy sense of self-

worth. Although discrepant in other respects, everyone’s memories of Bourton point to Peter’s

passion for Clarissa rather than hers for him. Thoughts of her parents, not Peter, bring tears to

her eyes. Despite her grief upon rejecting him, she knows the decision saved her life. She

“embraces the more distanced marriage to Richard over the more passionate option of marrying

Peter to maintain an autonomy which the latter man would certainly not have allowed” (Littleton

52). She does not live through and for Richard, nor does she shape her behavior according to his

career, evidenced by Lady Bruton’s belief that she is the cause of its mediocrity. Throughout the

day she talks of “my party,” not “our party”; if it were up to Richard, they would throw no

parties at all. Together Richard and Clarissa defy convention. That he “does not fully inhabit

the dominant position of husband that the social order approves” (Henderson 145) renders him a

remarkable man, indeed. Clarissa, in turn, understands that her marriage alone need not

constitute her identity.

The Problem with Peter Walsh

The relationships of those linked to Clarissa elucidate her marriage and demonstrate

Woolf as a modernist writing “under specific, apparently historical strain” (Bradbury 26). The clash between Clarissa’s past and present replicates modern writers’ attempts to incorporate literary history into their work while shaping it anew. Peter Walsh is the first person Clarissa 36

thinks of on this June morning, when an open window and fresh breeze propel her mind back to

Bourton. Yet she feels ambivalent, anticipating his return from India but neglecting to read his

letters to learn the date of his arrival. When he visits her on the morning of her party, tension

between them arises at once in their misapprehension of each other. Peter sizes up the

Dalloways’ opulent home and scorns Clarissa’s preparations for the evening.

Clarissa bristles under the familiar disapproval, although she notes he too is “very well

dressed” (MD 46), clearly enjoying the fruits of his time overseas. Peter, in turn, vacillates

among thoughts of Clarissa, his impending second marriage, and his recent colonial experience.

Trying to synthesize the facets of his life, he only augments his confusion. Disdainful of Clarissa

and Richard’s lifestyle, “disliking India, and empire, and army as he did” (MD 61), he nevertheless approves of English pomp, privately envies the Dalloways’ affluence, and participates in English colonialism. He has little choice, “Coming as he did from a respectable

Anglo-Indian family which for at least three generations had administered the affairs of a continent” (MD 61). He insists on reading Western literature while stationed in the Himalayas and plans now to enlist Richard Dalloway for help in finding a job.

Overwhelmed by emotion, Peter bursts into tears while talking to Clarissa, collecting himself to confess that he is, once again, in love “with a girl in India” (MD 50). His raw emotion embarrasses Clarissa, but she cannot then help envision India as an uninhibited land where middle-aged men continue to fall in love. “If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day,” she thinks, recalling her own single bed set apart from Richard’s (MD 52). For her the colonial project exemplifies intriguing sexual encounters. “Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he [Peter] were starting directly upon some great voyage” (MD 53). 37

Her regret wells up when considering Peter’s exotic lifestyle, yet at one time she disapproved of perceived sexual impropriety.

The narrative shifts swiftly to Peter’s point of view as another memory from Bourton

unfolds. He recalls a party one night when a crowd of guests discussed “a man who had married

his housemaid, one of the neighbouring squires” (MD 66), and had deigned to bring her to

Bourton one day for a visit. The social transgressions are even worse than they had surmised, for

someone divulges that the woman had had a baby before the couple were married. The news

causes Clarissa to blush, infuriating Peter despite his awareness that “in those days a girl brought

up as she was knew nothing” (MD 66). His disgust with her prudery betrays the patriarchal

paradox of keeping women ignorant and then criticizing them for their ignorance. To him,

Clarissa seems cold and cruel, even frightening. She, on the other hand, cannot bear such

scrutiny—his cool appraisal of her amid a crowd of people. Unlike the understanding Clarissa

shares with Richard, her and Peter’s wordless communications continually misfire.

Nearly thirty years later, Peter still misconstrues her, disdaining her “network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with bunches of flowers, little presents,” believing “she did it genuinely, from a natural instinct” (MD 86). Hers is the busy routine of a latter-day Victorian wife, bound not only to her immediate family but also to family and friends who “required attention and took up time; one’s obligation to them, no matter how slight, was not a matter of choice” (Zwerdling 154). Denied education, employment, and the vote, Victorian women either fulfilled gender roles or suffered poverty and social disgrace. In fact, “the charitable endeavors with which they filled their hours were less the fruit of altruism than of a desperate need for occupation” (Levine 131). Clarissa loves the city, however, taking advantage of Richard’s absences from home to step out and enjoy the crowds and shops. She enjoys 38

fulfilling her social and domestic duties because she understands their significance, despite the patriarchy’s denigration of women’s traditional activities.

Victorian males suffered no such restrictions on their opportunities, let alone ridicule of

their interests and efforts.20 Assessing Clarissa’s choices as instinctual and women’s rights as an

“antediluvian” subject (MD 81), Peter fails to understand Clarissa’s expressions of selfhood. Far

from being just a hostess, “she creates parties not to advance herself or her husband’s career in

society, but to express society’s values (filtered through Clarissa’s consciousness) as part of the

whole array of ideas brought to life by the party” (Littleton 44). Peter believes women obsess

over meaningless tasks while men attend to important business. She, in turn, illustrates “the

ways conventions can both restrict our behavior in society and enable us to continue functioning

in it” (Caughie 108). Peter’s homeless, jobless state could afford him the freedoms society’s conformists do not enjoy. He too succumbs to convention, however, loathing the governing class but exploiting it to his advantage, thus perpetuating its unfair distribution of resources.

Clarissa, on the other hand, if anchored to her Westminster home, surrounds herself with the

people, memories, objects, sights, and sounds she loves to partake of the interconnectedness of

life’s many facets.

Belittling Clarissa’s affairs, Peter discusses his upcoming marriage to rouse her jealousy.

Musing on his fiancée, Daisy, he conflates her and Clarissa until they become an amalgam of

confused, repressed love and memory. Admitting that for stretches of time “he never thought of

Daisy,” Peter wonders, “Could it be that he was in love with her, then, remembering the misery,

the torture, the extraordinary passion of those days?” (MD 89)—a thought relating to his and

Clarissa’s tormented affair at Bourton. His thoughts then revert to Daisy, his relief upon leaving

20 Hugh Stevens and Caroline Hewlitt, eds. Modernist Sexualities (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2000) 4. 39

her and India behind, although he grew “annoyed to find all her little attentions—cigars, notes, a

rug for the voyage—in his cabin” (MD 89). Peter admits to himself that his real reason for

marrying Daisy is to prevent her from marrying anyone else, a selfish motive that hardens him

toward Clarissa, who he feels is “cold as an icicle” (MD 90), having left him for Richard. Now

that Peter is back in England, his engagement assumes an unreality, a lack of solidity enabling

him to disregard his role in the messy connections between England and India.

Post-war England, Embattled

Peter is abroad from 1918 to1923, a crucial period in England’s history.21 When he

returns, he is naïve and out of touch. Strolling through Regent’s Park, he finds London

“enchanting” and suspects only that the lapsed time must have been “somehow very important”

(MD 79, 80). Witnessing the anguish between Septimus and Lucrezia Smith, a shell-shocked

British soldier and his Italian wife, he deems it from afar “an amusing thing [. . .]; lovers squabbling under a tree” (MD 79). Away during the war’s aftermath, Peter cannot appreciate the

country’s ongoing devastation and the wretchedness of veterans like Septimus. He expects life

in London to be as before, whereas Mrs. Dalloway presents “a postwar civilization fraught with

agonizing social contradictions, yet vibrating with the vital force of the future” (Froula,

“Mourning” 128), a force Peter does not fully assimilate. Accustomed to wielding power in

India, he exudes a similar air of entitlement back in London, expecting to be handed a house and

21 Peter misses several crucial events while he is away, such as the burial of an unknown soldier at Westminster Abbey on November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the armistice. “A ‘beautiful silk pall’ presented in 1919 by members of the theatrical profession ‘in memory of their brethren who fell in the War’ was laid above the open grave [. . .] On the third anniversary, in 1921, the permanent gravestone of black Belgian marble was unveiled at a service.” Masami Usui, “The Female Victims of the War in Mrs. Dalloway” (154) in Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991). (Peter does see a procession of boys carry a wreath “which they had fetched from Finsbury Pavement to the empty tomb” [MD 57].) In the early 1920s, approximately 40,000 memorials appeared throughout England. Karen Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999) 31. 40

a job through no effort of his own. He is among many Britons determined to forget the

barbarism of war, for “[t]hough the war had transformed the lives of millions of people, only one

character in the novel—Septimus Smith— seems to have counted its cost” (Zwerdling 122).

Peter, like so many others, would rather pretend society has not overturned and that all continues

per usual.22 He sees through vacuous English traditions but accepts them as an inevitable,

natural part of his existence.

Peter also disingenuously claims to reject patriarchal privilege. He applauds his hotel

acquaintances, the Morrises, for their lack of class-consciousness, yet is pleased to note their

approval of his taste and manners. At Clarissa’s party, he listens with scorn to the “pernicious

hubble-bubble” of England’s governing class, happy to have been free of it in India “if it were

only to hear baboons chatter and coolies beat their wives” (MD 190). His brusque dismissal of

India illustrates his arrogance, a subconscious satisfaction to be once again amid that which he

claims to despise. Peter is among many colonizers who dehumanize their subjects to account for

treating them brutally. Rather than draw upon the past to effect greater self-awareness, he does so to justify his more selfish undertakings.

Vagaries of Modern Consciousness

Woolf herself harbored contrary stances toward colonialism, at times peppering her

personal writings with derogatory racial comments. Like Clarissa confusing massacred

Armenians with Albanians, Woolf writes in May 1919, “I laughed to myself over the quantities

of Armenians. How can one mind whether they number 4,000 or 4,000,000? The feat is beyond

22 Members of the governing class in particular possess something “inflexible, unresponsive, or evasive in their nature that makes them incapable of reacting appropriately to the critical events of their time or of their own lives. [. . .] Richard Dalloway’s is a world that penalizes despair and idealizes [. . .] ramrod bearing.” Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 122, 124. 41

me” (Diary I 271). Seemingly callous, the remark demonstrates Woolf’s “sense of how the

language of war has been deprived of the terror and horror it should inspire” (Levenback, Great

War 7), how growing death tolls abroad desensitize people to tragedy.23 Woolf was well aware

of British atrocities in India and Africa, largely because of her husband Leonard’s anti-colonial

activities. His novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) garnered praised for its respectful depiction of Asians, while his Empire and Commerce of Africa (1920) and Imperialism and

Civilization (1928) fiercely critiqued colonialism and traditional British values. Woolf

appreciated the importance of understanding world affairs, expressing newfound respect for a

female visitor to her home, for instance, able to discuss the Indian Bill and Indian religions with

Leonard.24 “Despite Virginia Woolf’s residual insensitivity to colonized people and her lack of

first-hand knowledge of the colonies, she felt strongly that the English civilization which the

British imposed on their subjects was not worth exporting” (Phillips xxxv). Woolf’s entire oeuvre may been seen as a response against Empire;25 Peter’s views on marriage certainly reflect

how colonial attitudes abroad reverberate through England.

Peter’s colonial experience shapes his relationship with his fiancée, Daisy, for men who

“think they are innately superior to women [. . .] think they are innately superior to people of other races, religions, or nationalities” (Bazin 24). To marry Peter, Daisy must obtain a divorce from her husband, which means relinquishing her children and any hope of a respectable position in society. Her dilemma is a familiar one, portrayed by England’s “new woman” novelists, who criticized marriage “in terms of its injustices: a woman’s economic dependency, loss of legal and

23 Karen Levenback writes of Woolf’s deliberate use of irony in her diaries to practice the “state of denial” that “would lead her to efface her personal feelings for the sake of a studied impersonality. This posture she believed necessary to literary control, demonstrating through indirection and irony that the civilian reality was based in illusions, chief among them an illusion of immunity.” “Virginia Woolf’s ‘War in the Village’ and “The War From the Street’: An Illusion of Immunity,” in Hussey’s Virginia Woolf and War 45. 24 Woolf, Diary I 254. 25 Such is Kathy J. Phillips’s thesis in Virginia Woolf Against Empire. 42

political rights, an unequal divorce law, and, above all, the assumption of a husband’s ownership of his wife” (Bland 124). Far younger than Peter, Daisy may even“ be a widow with a past one of these days, dragging about in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminately” (MD 173), according to a female friend of his. He rejects such a notion not because he holds more charitable views of women—that perhaps a single woman will not “drag about” in moral depravity. Rather, “He didn’t mean to die yet” (MD 173). He underestimates the consequences for Daisy that a connection with him may bring, and infantilizes her, calling her a girl when she is 24 years old with two children.

Yet his relationship with Daisy comes “so naturally,” Peter thinks, unlike the “fuss [. . .] bother [. . .] finicking [. . .] and fidgeting” undergone with Clarissa (MD 172). Peter equates female autonomy with “fussiness” and is irked that Clarissa “couldn’t simply find them a lodging and be nice to Daisy; introduce her” (MD 174). His criticism of her as the perfect hostess becomes ironic when he resents her failure to properly host him and his fiancée. Nevertheless when he pictures Daisy, she is strapped to a dog-cart, moving further and further away until she

“has no positive work in the world except to prop up his ego” (Phillips 16). In Peter Walsh’s more obtuse opinions of women and marriage lie elements of “exploitation and enslavement, of rapacity and division, upon which the social system of England [. . .] rests” (Rosenfeld 155). He views Clarissa’s self-possession as cold, Daisy’s spiritedness as childish; spotting a solitary woman in London, he follows her, hoping for a liaison. His first marriage is over and he dreads his second. He faults Clarissa for clinging to an artificial, bygone world when he will not relinquish the rewards of British imperialism.26 Throughout the novel, Peter is emotional and

26 Sonya Rudikoff’s information on the Stephen siblings sheds light on Peter Walsh’s attitudes. “In the years after the Boer War, the Stephens may have condemned British colonialism in India and South Africa; they may have strenuously abjured the ideology of late-Victorian piety. Their new thought, new art, and new freedom in speech defied Edwardian duplicity [. . .]. They set themselves against the entire history of bourgeois greed, luxury, and 43

pensive yet remains unaware of how his attitudes toward Britain and India, women and men,

resonate.

Peter decides to attend the Dalloways’ party mainly to “ask Richard what they were

doing in India—the conservative duffers” (MD 77), his vilification of colonial mismanagement

at home reflecting discomfort with his own colonial activities. He avoids the “returned Anglo-

Indians” in the Oriental Club, preferring to sit outside at night and watch the young people go by,

who suggest to him the glorious possibility of a “shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immovable” (MD 178). He anticipates other, younger people rectifying the devastation his generation has caused. He struggles to understand his own choices and mistakes by resurrecting his and Clarissa’s history, devising his own tunneling process to reach the origins of his dissatisfaction.

Yet while Peter’s memories of Clarissa “flower out, open, shed [their] scent, let you

touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding” (MD 169), he persists in

picturing her at Bourton, where she has not lived for decades. He cannot imagine her in the

present, in an established marriage with Richard; it is less painful to remember her the way she

was, almost his until the tearful night she rejects him in favor of Dalloway. His nostalgia

displays the “sickness for home” prevalent in modern literature, yet if the “past is not just a time,

but a place” (Bernstein 40), Woolf suggests the futility of trying to recover it by disavowing the

present. Luxuriating in memories of Clarissa, Peter is annoyed by the note she sends in the

afternoon, for the familiar blue stationery reminds him that she is “Mrs. Dalloway,” observing

pedestrian customs such as sending calling cards. Similarly, he is shocked to see her Aunt

exploitation. But they did not and would not separate themselves from the income created by it, or from the social roots maintained by that income” (197). 44

Helena at the party that night, assuming she had died long ago. He cannot draw those from the

past forward into the present or acknowledge their departure from his sphere.

Modern Victoriana

If Peter clings to his own personal history, Hugh Whitbread embodies England’s broader

Victorian past. He is another figure from Bourton days, one whom Peter and Sally have always considered an imbecile. Seeing him at Clarissa’s party, Peter denigrates Hugh and scorns his official duties as meaningless trinkets. He despises him for reminiscing about inconsequential past moments, an acceptable indulgence for old women like Lady Bruton, who Peter sees as

“derived from the eighteenth century” (MD 190), but shameful in any self-respecting man.

“Villains there must be, and, God knows, the rascals who get hanged for battering the brains of a girl out in a train do less harm on the whole than Hugh Whitbread and his kindness!” (MD 190)

Peter is right, for the patriarchy upheld by Hugh and his ilk subordinates and victimizes women.

Once again, however, he fails to appreciate his own role in maintaining the status quo, likening as he does a cool breeze to a woman removing her clothes, and the fading sunlight to war and rape, with London’s bayonets skewering the sky.

Hugh Whitbread harbors no less threatening attitudes, for his own marriage manifests patriarchal victimization of women. Confined to her home or to hospitals, his wife Evelyn fulfills Victorian expectations of women as sickly and weak. Clarissa recalls her numerous visits to Evelyn in nursing homes, bringing a gift of some kind to “that indescribably dried-up little woman” (MD 12). Lady Bruton also perfunctorily inquires about “poor Evelyn” (MD 121), while Peter remembers her vaguely as inconsequential and dull, one of many spectral Victorian women kept out of sight so as not to disturb their husbands. Choosing a new jewel for Evelyn, 45

Hugh takes more pleasure in flaunting his wealth and abusing the clerk than in finding something to please his wife. Accompanying Hugh, Richard wonders what good another necklace can possibly do Evelyn. More likely she would enjoy an outing or perhaps a little companionship to break up her monotonous days, with Hugh forever away from home, attending meetings and parties. As Hugh is the man most loyal to Victorian mores, so Evelyn lives the most stagnant life of any woman in the novel.

Disparaging Evelyn, Clarissa fails to realize how close she came to suffering a similar fate, having recently been ill. It is her good fortune to have had heart problems, legitimated by doctors, while Evelyn, Hugh tells Clarissa, suffers from “some internal ailment” which “Clarissa

Dalloway would quite understand without requiring him to specify” (MD 8). The short story

“Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” is more explicit. Hugh’s wife is about fifty-two, Clarissa recalls, so “it is probably that” (Mrs. Dalloway’s Party 20). Menopausal, or post-menopausal,

Evelyn has outlived her reproductive usefulness. If female initiation rites are “associated with the menarche, a biological event in each girl’s history,” as Froula explains regarding Rachel’s experiences in The Voyage Out (“Chrysalis” 64), then women undergoing menopause become ciphers, nuisances to their husbands, and unwilling participants in a rite of expulsion. “[T]he conviction that female anatomy was destiny was equivocal enough to require vigorous reinforcement through detailed prescription of behavior and priorities,” Froula writes

(“Chrysalis” 65). Hugh claims Evelyn’s ailment is “nothing serious” (MD 8), yet nevertheless it warrants her removal from society.

Although she resists categorization in her own life, Clarissa classifies other women and becomes unnerved by those she cannot comprehend. Doris Kilman elicits Clarissa’s fear and distrust not because she is single, ascetic, and of German heritage—factors already causing her 46

marginalization in post-war England—but because she exerts such a hold on Elizabeth. In

addition, Miss Kilman resembles Peter Walsh in her scarcely veiled scorn for the Dalloways’

affluence and Clarissa’s beautiful clothes, bearing her own tattered coat like a badge of self-

denial and moral superiority. Later, however, out to tea with Elizabeth, she glances at the

discarded pastries on a neighboring table and wonders how she might unobtrusively stick them in

her bag. She hungers also for the companionship of the beautiful young Elizabeth, resenting

Clarissa’s maternal claims upon her.

Modernism and Bloomsbury

The antagonism between Clarissa and Miss Kilman reflects issues crucial to Woolf and her early twentieth-century cohorts in the Bloomsbury Group. No longer saddled with dying relatives in gloomy houses, Virginia Stephen and her siblings moved to lighter, airier rooms in

Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, a neighborhood of London, after their father’s death in 1904.

Comprised mainly of Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge friends, the first incarnation of the

Bloomsbury Group gathered on Thursday evenings to discuss art, literature, philosophy, and politics in willful disregard of their Victorian upbringing. Men and women spoke freely—and partook—of previously risqué matters such as homosexuality and open marriage. “For the first time a group existed in which masculinity and femininity were marvelously mixed in its members” (Heilbrun, Androgyny 118), whose art reflected their fresh outlook on life. The Post-

Impressionism exhibit and Dreadnought Hoax of 1910; the opening of the Omega Workshops in

1913 by Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell; and the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent 47

Victorians in 1914 and Clive Bell’s anti-war pamphlet of 1915 are just several notable

Bloomsbury challenges to the establishment.27

Although Bloomsbury is celebrated for its artistic and literary innovations, it is also

accused of exclusivity, with certain members unwilling to relinquish class privilege. With their

much-touted aristocratic relatives28 and visitors like Henry James and William Thackeray to their

childhood home, the Stephens maintained their highbrow connections even while “set[ting] themselves against the entire history of bourgeois greed, luxury, and exploitation” (Rudikoff

197). The death of her Aunt Caroline Stephen in 1909 provided Woolf with an annuity of nearly

500 pounds. Vanessa clashed ideologically with her bourgeois in-laws but nevertheless enjoyed their wealth.29 While it “looks as if it travesties and sabotages the conventions of Victorian life

[. . .] ‘Bloomsbury’ in its turn developed the social habits, mannerisms, and ways of thinking of

an excluding network” (Lee 54-55), complete with servants to cook, clean, and answer the door.

After attending a meeting of the Women’s Co-operative Guild in March 1918, for instance,

Woolf wonders “why the women come—what inducement there is in such a passive employment

as sitting silent, half asleep, in a chair for an hour” (Diary I 122). She fails to consider that

sitting peacefully for an hour is something working-class women rarely do. The published

versions of her “London Scene” essays similarly gloss over England’s social inequities.30

27 The first Post-Impressionist exhibition, with works by Manet, Cézanne, Derain, Gauguin, Picasso, Seurat, and van Gogh, among others, “caused a great uproar,” with viewers “progressively more startled as they went farther into the gallery” (Hussey, A-Z 217). The Dreadnought Hoax refers to the February day when Woolf, Adrian Stephen, and four others dressed in Orientalist fashion to “perpetrate a hoax on the British Navy” (A-Z 73-4). The Omega Workshops were intended to “produce decorative art from a background of painting rather than crafts. [. . .] The Omega brought together many young English artists” (A-Z 195). Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians contains chapters on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon. Strachey sought to “attack his subject in unexpected places,” stripping each of their mythology and exposing them as emblematic of Victorian hypocrisy and greed (A-Z 82-3). Clive Bell’s 1915 Peace At Once “was seized and destroyed by order of the Lord Mayor of London” (A-Z 19). 28 Rudikoff 243. 29 Rudikoff 159. 30 The “London Scene” essays, published in Good Housekeeping between December 1931 and December 1932, “reveal Virginia Woolf’s ambivalence about identity, social position, and access to material possessions,” writes 48

Such contradictions soon became apparent to Woolf. Long before Three Guineas (1938)

or even A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote of England’s mistreatment of women and the

poor. In fact, “she never privileged the oppression of women over the oppression of the working

class” (Marcus, Patriarchy 11). By April 1918, her opinion of the Guild had changed, even if she yet denies working class women a language of their own: “I went to the Guild, which pleased

me, by its good sense, & the evidence that it does somehow stand for something real to these women. In spite of their solemn passivity they have a deeply hidden & inarticulate desire for

something beyond the daily life” (Diary 1 141). She often found her own life confining and dull

and became increasingly anxious for the experiences, emotions, and voices of working women.31

“Though she haunted the London streets, kept her eyes open and asked countless questions, what

she had managed to find out did not satisfy her. It was inevitably superficial and second-hand”

(Zwerdling 117). She always regretted her failure to understand the lower classes.

In her personal writing, Woolf generally follows cracks about the working class with self-

censure and a longing to dispense with dispiriting Victorian holdovers, like managing servants.32

Two instances in Mrs. Dalloway reflect her appreciation of the endless work of the scullery, the

first as Richard and Hugh sit down to lunch at Lady Bruton’s:

T]here began a soundless and exquisite passing to and fro through swing doors of

aproned, white-capped maids [. . .], adepts in a mystery or grand deception practised

by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty to two, when, with a wave of the hand [. . .]

Susan Squier, as the published versions both “nostalgically evoked characteristic Victorian” Londoners (489) and also expressed empathy for working-class women and wifely drudgery (496). Susan Squier, “ ‘The London Scene’: Gender and Class in Virginia Woolf’s London,” Twentieth Century Literature 29.4 (1983) 488-500. 31 “Woolf will not speak for the working woman. She is curious to hear their stories, as “one of the effects of post- suffrage feminism was that working-class women’s experience began to be not only observed and imagined but listened to, written down—often by themselves—and published.” Sally Alexander, “Room of One’s Own: 1920s Feminist Utopias,” Women: A Cultural Review, 11.3 (2000) 274. 32 For further examples of Woolf’s servant problems, see Diary I pp. 158, 197, and 227. Volume II of Quentin Bell’s biography, pp. 58-59, also details Woolf’s volatile eighteen-year relationship with her servant, Nelly Boxall. 49

there rises instead this profound illusion in the first place about the food—how it is

not paid for; and then that the table spreads itself voluntarily. (MD 115)

Like Peter enjoying London society heedless of its price in human life, the upper classes ignore the injustice occurring within their homes. Clarissa, too, believes smiling at her servants and foisting used gifts upon them compensates for their low-paying, physically exhausting work.

Insecure, she hopes to earn her servants’ trust and approval through small kindnesses that do nothing to improve their condition.

When her servants learn the Prime Minister is to attend her party that night, they feel no awe or excitement. “It made no difference to Mrs. Walker among the plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins which, however hard they washed up in the scullery, seemed to be all on top of her [. . .]. All she felt was, one Prime Minister more or less made not a scrap of difference” (MD 181-2). Before the Dalloways’ party even ends, Mrs. Walker girds herself for the criticism sure to come from Clarissa the next day. Far from being cocooned in an upper- middle-class world, Woolf discloses the plight and frustrations of working women.

Woolf herself was an avid social worker, playing “an active role in suffrage groups, the

Women’s Co-operative Guild, the Fabian Society, the Labour Party, and the London and

National Society for Women’s Service” (Phillips xii). She grew to appreciate working-class women’s austerity, and her own lifestyle was relatively simple. She “spent little on clothes. She smoked cheap Belgian cigarettes and later switched to cheap cigars. Her little luxuries were in things like writing pens, or coloured papers, and later a clothes’ allowance for her niece

Angelica” (Parsons 175). In fact her position in upper-middle-class society enables her to 50

critique it better. The inhibitions of Mrs. Dalloway’s characters, their hapless attempts at

communication must be overcome to attain lives of equality and individuality. Peter, Sally, and

Hugh, among others, shrink from the arduous task of forging a new consciousness through self-

reflection and honesty. Instead they build lives and marriages upon easy yet meaningless habits and traditions. Apart from Clarissa, Septimus Smith is the sole figure to reject such a lifestyle, and he can do so only by dying.

Sustaining Memories

At Clarissa’s party that night, Peter talks with Sally Seton, a profounder source of

Clarissa’s meditations on the past. Sally is an ardent young feminist during her time at Bourton,

determined to “reform the world” and “found a society to abolish private property” (MD 38).

She even writes an impassioned letter on the subject, but never sends it. Laughing, arguing,

smoking, streaking— such are Clarissa’s memories of Sally, more able than Peter at the time to

elicit her excitement and passion. The young women become close, talking all night about sex,

politics, economics, and philosophy in one-sided conversations in which Clarissa absorbs Sally’s

ideas. Alone in her attic room decades later, Clarissa’s kaleidoscopic images of Sally overwhelm

her; “she could remember standing in her bedroom [. . .] and saying aloud, ‘She is beneath this

roof…She is beneath this roof!’” (MD 39) Dismissing the affair as dead and gone, Clarissa

disavows the subconscious impact of Sally on her life. She is in fact “erotically inflamed by

memories of Sally” (Marcus, Patriarchy 117-18), which she utilizes in part to understand her

marriage to Richard. Together she and Sally rejected Victorian expectations for women.

Clinging to such memories, Clarissa reminds herself of her ongoing struggle against external

pressures on her identity. 51

Peter also remembers Sally, in one instance after seeing a young woman wearing makeup. Despite her brazenness, he thinks, she too will cave in to societal expectations. One day she will “marry some rich man and live in a large house near Manchester” (MD 80). The idea rings familiar and Peter realizes that Sally, “the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man [. . .], the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!” (MD 80-1), has gone this conventional route. As he cannot link the old Clarissa with the new, Peter has trouble connecting the Sally he sees at Clarissa’s party with his feminist friend of years ago, who argued with Hugh Whitbread about the government’s culpability in the plight of England’s prostitutes.

Attributing her antagonism toward Hugh to Hugh’s ill-fated attempt to kiss her one night, Peter links female autonomy with repressed heterosexuality, certain that women will eventually come around and “marry a rich man.” He disparages Sally and Hugh further by doubting the kiss ever happened: Hugh’s snobbery, he believes, would have prevented him from approaching someone like Sally, penniless and from a broken home. And so Sally marries conventionally and Hugh has his Evelyn; yet for Clarissa, Peter believes, “there’s nothing in the world so bad [. . .] as marriage” (MD 46), reserving for her, as always, his greatest recriminations.

Compelled to Conform

Sally Seton enters Clarissa’s party as Lady Rosseter, boasting of her “five enormous boys” (MD 188). Clarissa thinks her “older, happier, less lovely” than before (MD 188), yet is thrilled to see her so well, for while everyone expected Sally to paint or write, Clarissa feared her life would “end in some awful tragedy” (MD 199), the conventional price a woman pays for living unconventionally. Her arrival uninvited shows a spark of the old fire, but she no longer follows politics and lives an isolated life in the country. Coming of age at the turn of the 52 century, she has little choice. Women were expected to marry, their social status entirely dependent on the men to whom they were linked. Single women were more prey to social, political, and economic deprivation than those who were married. Had Sally lived openly with a woman, as her Bourton days indicated she might, she would likely have experienced a decline in class status, linked as it was with sexual impropriety. Unmarried women remained respectable only if connected to a male-run household.33 The strife between Sally’s parents, perhaps culminating in divorce or scandal— synonymous at the time— may have precluded even this shred of support. With no formal education or job skills, like most women of the time, Sally eventually marries.

Ostensibly an adult, Sally regresses to childlike ignorance after her marriage, which confers status but no real responsibilities on women.34 She spends most of her time in her suburban home and garden, ignorant of current events. She retains a bit of egalitarianism, recalling in the same instant a family heirloom from Marie Antoinette as well as her former poverty, neither of which impresses her much. Speaking of her wealth, she laughingly tells Peter she has ten thousand pounds a year. Conspicuously proud of living among merchants and manufacturers, making a point of discussing her fortune with Peter, she nevertheless disparages

Clarissa for her display of wealth and ease. Sally refuses to accept the Dalloway marriage, dismissing Clarissa’s domain with a casual wave of her hand.

Like Peter, Sally is conflicted about the past, remembering it fondly but ultimately rejecting it as youthful exuberance, better forgotten. She is still blunt—to Peter’s mortification, as she tells him she believes Clarissa always loved him more than Richard—but her concerns have devolved from suffrage into gossip about party guests. She remains grateful to Clarissa for

33 Levine 6. 34 Levine 42. 53

providing Bourton as a refuge from her unhappy family, but feels alienated from her and insulted by her refusals to visit her home when invited. Sally assumes class prejudice keeps Clarissa away. Oblivious to the Dalloways’ sleeping arrangements, she cannot know the likelier cause of

Clarissa’s reticence: her unwillingness to reveal her and Richard’s odd—or nonexistent—sex life, particularly in the face of Sally’s obvious sexuality. While “one of the most significant features of feminist friendship at this time was its capacity to withstand the potentially isolating

mechanics of marriage” (Levine 71), Clarissa and Sally’s friendship suffers from their

misperceptions of each other’s lives.

England’s reversion toward the war’s end to traditional social values thwarted young

women like Sally. In 1916, for instance, with so many men away at the war, women comprised a

substantial portion of the work force and helped redefine women’s roles in society.35 That same

year, however, “with the nation’s fighting strength being drained away by the death toll at the front, fears built up that its moral strength was being undermined at home” (Haste 39, 50). The pre-war sense of liberation and change for women gave way to “countervailing social pressures

[. . .] to curtail women’s economic independence, revive their ‘femininity’ and dependence, and send women back to the home and keep them as nurturers of the future” (Haste 63).

Employment opportunities shrank in number and kind. Having known deprivation early in life,

Sally avoids risking it again and finds economic safety in marriage.

After listening to Sally, Peter views Clarissa differently. She now seems to have escaped, not succumbed to, the standard married woman’s life as appendage to husband and children.

Sally’s is a Victorian milieu wherein a large family adds to a woman’s prestige but saps her of

35 Helga Druxes, Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996) 51. 54

the time and energy for her needs.36 With just one child, Clarissa enjoys privacy and space while

Sally must cater to six males.37 Thus Woolf situates the “locus of all great aesthetic, social, and

political change” (Morgan 92) in the permanent and temporary homes of Mrs. Dalloway’s characters. Criticizing in others characteristics she herself possesses, Sally manifests England’s painful struggle with modernity. The bustling city is alluring yet her family retreats to the suburbs. Flaunting one’s wealth is gauche yet affluence garners respect for a woman. The

British Empire is built upon colonialism yet Sally pities Peter, thinking, “it must be lonely at his age to have no home, nowhere to go” (MD 209).

Roving from England to India and back again, Peter indeed internalizes the paradigms of

conservative British society. Sally’s turnabout from her Bourton days shows her to be similarly

assimilated to patriarchy. Clarissa may feel unhappy and alone at times, but is wise to have

rejected them. She “needed people, always people” (MD 87) to enliven her days. Married to

Richard, she has the freedom to seek them out, finding kinship with them in her seemingly

uneventful daily routine, enacting “a female aesthetic which is based on process, rather than

finished works of art” (Marcus, Patriarchy 14). With the character of Clarissa, Woolf expresses

the value of reflecting on the past not for retreat or escape but for comprehending the present,

departing psychologically from oppressive conventions when to do so physically is impossible.

Woolf demonstrates how “people, working either alone or in groups, can have a powerful impact

on their society—that pressure is sometimes exerted in the opposite direction” (Zwerdling 3).

36 Earl G. Ingersoll explains that Queen Victoria, with nine children, was a “role model for women in the later nineteenth century.” She “more than anyone established the notion of a nurturing mother willing to sacrifice her own fulfillment in order that her children might have the opportunity to pursue theirs.” Earl G. Ingersoll, “Images of the Family in Modernist Fiction,” English Language Notes 26.2 (1998) 63-4. 37 Zwerdling discusses the “deliberate shrinking of family size” in the early 1900s. “The demographic statistics here are dramatic,” he writes. “The mid-Victorian family had an average of six children; by the 1920s the figure had dropped to two and two-tenths. This is perhaps the most significant change in the entire history of the family.” Virginia Woolf and the Real World 160-1. 55

Clarissa’s marriage fails to quell disquieting emotions and self-doubt. Nevertheless she contends

with life honestly. In a society unwilling to value women’s lives, Clarissa values her own.

Septimus

Also victimized by patriarchy, Septimus Warren Smith cannot express his anguish

without reprisal. Because English society demands the repression of male emotion, he finds an

outlet for his in death, a fall into the abyss where sensations abruptly cease. More than any other

in the novel, the marriage of Septimus and Rezia demonstrates the grievous consequences of societies in crisis. The unhappy couple is first seen mid-morning on Bond Street, where Clarissa buys her flowers. Septimus mutters to himself and frightens his wife with his erratic behavior. It

is not just his avowal to kill himself that upsets her, but also the possibility that the English

people nearby might overhear him. Everyone’s attention is diverted from him, however, toward

a sedan and its unidentified passenger. While others imagine royalty or a celebrity inside,

Septimus perceives the crowd as a sea of malevolent faces staring him down. He jumps when

Rezia speaks to him and his paranoia grows as he imagines fingers pointing, eyes glowering, and

him powerless against them.

Terrified by such visceral and, to her, incomprehensible emotions, Rezia tries to stave them off and mime the role of a traditional British wife. She desires marriage to her fantasy of

English masculinity, not to the defeated young man by her side. Unlike other “war brides [. . .] brought to Britain as a symbol of male triumph, power, egotism, and romanticism” (Usui 151),

Rezia arrives in England linked to Septimus through failure, impotence, and fear, chosen by him in a moment of panic after the death of his commanding officer. The horror of war “sharpened

Septimus’s awareness of the false basis on which accepted norms of human conduct rest” 56

(Rachman 5), yet in desperation he resorts to one such norm, marriage, which proves incapable

of healing a mind in which the war rages on. Nature appears deadly, and strangers loom as conspirators in his demise. Haunted by the slaughter he witnessed at the front, Septimus is made

to feel sick and dangerous back home, first for expressing too much grief and then for feeling

nothing at all. Sinking deeper into despair, he leaves Rezia to contend alone psychologically

with their disastrous situation. In post-war British society, he cannot express himself without

transgressing boundaries of repression and silence.38

Sitting in Regent’s Park, Rezia tries to distract Septimus by pointing toward a skywriting airplane, which he construes as transmitting signals from another realm. Septimus inhabits a parallel world in which mundane events bring tears to his eyes for resounding with his war

experience. “Back ‘home,’” Christine Froula explains, “Septimus is fated to know ‘everything,’ to grasp ‘the meaning of the world,’ and to bear the burden of witnessing his civilization’s unimaginable violence without being driven mad” (“Mourning” 149). After losing his commanding officer, Evans, he can feel no emotion toward anyone else, particularly his wife.

That which society says should impress him—his relationship with Rezia, finding a job—fails to

move him, while visions of Evans and the thunderous passing of time “together meant the birth

of a new religion” (MD 26). His inverse responses to stimuli disgust his doctors, who, like many

therapists after the First World War, “took a harsh moral view of hysteria as within the conscious

control of the patient” (Showalter, Female Malady 176).

Dr. Holmes, general practitioner, and Sir William Bradshaw, renowned nerve specialist,

are among those of the governing class “engaged in a conspiracy to deny [war’s] pain or its

significance,” Alex Zwerdling explains. “Their ideal is stoicism, even if the price they pay is

38 Elaine Showalter discusses repressive English codes of masculinity, particularly their effect on veterans of the First World War, in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon 57

petrifaction” (122). Dutiful professional Englishmen, they perpetuate the myth of war as a

discrete event with no repercussions, telling Septimus there is “nothing whatever seriously the

matter with” him (MD 25). Yet Septimus and thousands like him are the true and visible

representations of military combat; thus in the depiction of Septimus lies Woolf’s “full-scale

Modernist onslaught on the official version of World War I” (Poole 80). As Elaine Showalter

reports, by war’s end, “80,000 cases [of shell-shock] had passed through army medical facilities.

[. . .] By 1918 there were over twenty army hospitals for shell-shock casualties in the United

Kingdom. This parade of emotionally incapacitated men was in itself a shocking contrast to the

heroic visions and masculinist fantasies that had preceded it” (Female Malady 168-9). Still

clinging to such fantasies, Rezia unwittingly participates in the erosion of her husband’s identity.

Clutching Septimus’s arm, Rezia contemplates her marriage and grasps for signs of her

husband’s recovery. She tries to draw him back to her, toward emotional restraint, putting “her

hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed” (MD 26).

Yet as he weaves in his seat to the movement of branches and birds’ wings, she despairs of his

sanity and shushes him. “People must notice; people must see,” she thinks, fearing or perhaps

desiring the notice of the Britons around her. She need not worry, for when even she talks aloud

to herself and looks wildly around lest anyone overheard, she sees, with a mixture of relief and

distress, “There was nobody” (MD 27). Surrounded by people, she is utterly alone, as Rhys’s

women characters experience isolation in the most crowded cities in the world. Leaving

Septimus for a moment, she becomes lost in thought, desiring his death and an end to her torment, growing furious with him, the doctors, and herself. A foreigner in England, she has no

one to confide in, even lying to her mother about the state of her marriage. “To love makes one

Books, 1985). 58

solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody” (MD 27) of her pain, and tries to comfort herself

with memories of Italy and home.

Rezia and Septimus’s marriage reflects the splits in post-war British society. Rezia is nostalgic for a past that never existed, her longing for drowsy afternoons in gardens with handsome soldiers in crisp uniforms the same patriarchal vision that leads to war in the first place. A veteran, Septimus is haunted by relentless visions in which nature and war become a confused jumble of fire and death. Rezia longs for an attentive husband, which Septimus can

never be since watching his friend die violently. At the time, he “congratulated himself upon

feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him” (MD 96) that most lauded of

English characteristics, stoicism. What he perceived as self-control, however, was inner turmoil

with no socially sanctioned outlet. Septimus inevitably becomes “neither one thing nor the

other” (MD 93), devoid of selfhood.

Rezia appreciates her husband’s pain but not its source or depth, misplacing her trust in

the doctors’ claims that he will improve with rest and food. Raised in a traditional family, she

too likely believes in the patriarchy’s ability to protect her, even while trying to escape its

clutches. She resembles Jean Rhys’s heroines, eager for excitement yet desirous above all of

security and safety in their lives. They seek it through marriage to unconventional men—

foreigners, thus removed and capable of removing them, they believe, from the boredom and

restrictions of home. Rezia is thrilled to marry Septimus after the war, eager for new places and

faces. A foreigner in England, however, linked to a mentally disturbed man, she can never

realize her contradictory desires for change and stability.

The more ill Septimus becomes, the more Rezia longs for normalcy, a family, “a son like

Septimus” (MD 99), unaware of his stockpile of arguments against having children. Since the 59

war, he has been amassing evidence of humanity’s limitless capacity for bloodshed. The

Shakespeare he once loved, for whom he enlisted in the army, now reads as a scathing critique of human life, “the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the

belly! [. . .] loathing, hatred, despair” (MD 98). To him, bringing children into the world is no

less violent than sending them to die at the front. One act begets the other, which even Rezia

comes to understand, conflating war, death, and marriage as she does. Yet she wants children,

she tells Septimus, while his doctors berate him for upsetting his nice young wife. Thus

“[a]nother symptom of Septimus’s madness seems to be the closely related fact of his refusal to

father a child [. . .]. There is something socially unacceptable, verging on criminal, in thus

resisting heterosexual convention” (McPherson 135). Clarissa’s celibacy is accepted, even

expected, while Septimus’s is loathed.39

The Smiths’ experience with their doctors further elucidates the deplorable state of

marriage within patriarchy. Dr. Holmes is a large, imposing man who privileges physical over

mental well-being. He mocks intellectual pursuits and suggests heavy food as more conducive to

psychological health. Intruding into their most private space, the bedroom, he assesses Rezia’s

looks, invites her to his house, and pushes her aside to reach Septimus, just as Peter Walsh pushes past Clarissa’s maid when he stops by to visit. The couple’s modest income exacerbates their troubles. With their landlady always within earshot, her daughter breaking into their flat at will, and the maid snooping around their desk and laughing at Septimus’s poems, the Smiths have no privacy. Sitting on their bed, Dr. Holmes ridicules their childless, probably sexless

marriage. If he is a “brute with the red nostrils” (MD 103), however, Sir William Bradshaw is

even worse. More intelligent than Holmes, he is better able to manipulate his patients.

39 Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987) 118. 60

Lady Bradshaw’s Respectable Suicide

The narrative shifts to a description of the doctor’s own marriage, as Rezia and Septimus approach his house for an appointment. Catering to the affluent, Sir William travels great distances to visit patients while his wife, Lady Bradshaw, waits for hours in the car. She, not

Clarissa, is a slave to her husband’s career, with nothing to do but waste her days and grow fat from dinner parties. Her activities reflect those of the typical Victorian woman, even Queen

Victoria herself, “going to some hospital [. . .] opening some bazaar” (MD 20), just as Lady

Bradshaw dabbles in “child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic” (MD 105). Lady Bradshaw is in fact an accomplished photographer, yet because she is subordinated in both her marriage and society, her husband’s career supercedes hers. Photography can only be a hobby for her, rather than a salaried profession.

In addition to taking pictures, Lady Bradshaw also “embroidered, knitted, spent four nights out of seven at home with her son” (MD 110), ensuring that her husband can fulfill his professional duties free of domestic distractions. Contrasted with Lady Bradshaw, Clarissa achieves the credit due her, for Lady Bradshaw has long since experienced “the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into” her husband’s (MD 111). Clarissa, on the other hand, plans her day around her own interests, not Richard’s, cultivating a more vibrant physical and mental life that allows her to handle any dissatisfactions or unhappiness. She welcomes volatile emotions into her life as part of her complete experience as a woman, while Lady Bradshaw feels only “a very slight dullness, or uneasiness” (MD 111) that brings on headaches and discommodes her guests. “‘Oppression’ is a word that has been legitimately appropriated by the dispossessed,”

Zwerdling states. “But Woolf showed that in its psychological rather than economic sense it 61

could also be accurately applied to people who had no material cares” (94), such as Lady

Bradshaw.

Working-class women also suffer in British society, wandering through the same park

where Septimus, Rezia, and Peter converge. Nineteen-year old Maisie Johnson, in London for

the first time, feels disoriented and overwhelmed by the city’s somnambulistic crowds.

Witnessing her panic, a woman feeding squirrels nearby appreciates her own aging body, for it

protects her from the sort of abuse, she believes, suffered by attractive, naïve young women.

Even when married, however, women’s humiliation goes on: “Oh, the cooks, and so on. Every man has his ways” (MD 31), the older woman thinks, accepting without question men’s inevitable disloyalty to their wives. For her, married life consists of “eating, drinking, and mating” (MD 31), animalistic behavior that squelches former desires for travel, education, and adventure. Another woman clutches a baby “stiff and white” (MD 24), while yet another talks

“like a sleepwalker” (MD 24). Women throughout London, wealthy or working-class, endure listless, deadening lives.

Although privileged and powerful, men also become dehumanized within patriarchy. Sir

Bradshaw bears the silver hair and harried face sanctioned by a society comprised of professional men. Yet in Three Guineas, Woolf laments that men’s traditional roles allow them no time to spend with families or notice, let alone appreciate, the changing seasons or the people around them. Their detachment from the natural rhythms of daily life leads to a society in which money reigns supreme. “‘And they have the very highest opinion of you at your office?’ Sir William murmured [to Septimus] ‘So that you have nothing to worry you, no financial anxiety, nothing?’” (MD 106) Yet there is something amiss, he believes, most likely in the marriage, for he plans to separate Septimus and Rezia, assuring they remain childless not in deference to 62

Septimus’s health but to make it “impossible for the unfit to propagate their views” (MD 110).40

His theories, along with the power to carry them out, victimize Rezia and Septimus as surely as

the government victimizes the young people it sends to war.

Because the British patriarchy depends on conventional gender roles for its power, it destroys marriages that pose a threat to conformity and artificiality, like the Smiths’. Septimus is weak and dysfunctional, Bradshaw believes, while Rezia tries to usurp the traditional male role of protector. Recognizing Bradshaw’s cruelty, Rezia determines to keep Septimus at home or, if necessary, accompany him to one of Sir Bradshaw’s asylums. During the afternoon, she rejoices at what she thinks might be a breakthrough, as Septimus jokes and plays with a hat she is making. “Not for weeks had they laughed like this together, poking fun privately like married people. What she meant was that if [anybody] had come in [. . .], they would not have understood what she and Septimus were laughing at” (MD 157). Rezia longs for a normal relationship in which couples banter with each other and develop a secret, telepathic means of communication. Her happiness is short-lived, however, for Septimus merely responds to whatever stimulus is at hand and reverts again to mental pictures of the dead and dying.

The couple is ultimately powerless against Holmes and Bradshaw, representatives of the

British ruling class that tramples and kills the weak. As Rezia runs downstairs to ward off

Holmes, he again muscles past her to reach Septimus. Young, female, and foreign, Rezia warrants no notice from professional Englishmen, who view her as an impediment to male mental health. Hearing Holmes approach, Septimus rejects the knife, gas, and razor for the

Bloomsbury window. The neighborhood signifies in Mrs. Dalloway what it did in Woolf’s own

40 After describing one doctor’s particularly brutal treatment of a shell-shocked veteran, Showalter explains, “it is easy to see how a wartime society accustomed to harsh treatment of hysterical women would become much more violent when confronting soldiers apparently unmanned by the experience at the front. Male hysteria elicited angry responses because men were not supposed to show weakness.” Showalter 178. 63 experience—a conflict between an innovative poetics and repressive social values. A diary entry of October 1918 resounds with Septimus’s leap into the abyss and impalement on the iron railings below, as Woolf considers “the gulf which we crossed between Kensington &

Bloomsbury [. . .] the gulf between respectable mum[m]ified humbug & life crude & impertinent perhaps, but living” (Diary I 206). For Septimus, the Bloomsbury window leads to death but also an escape from anguish and those who despise him.

Ever the overseer of female emotion, Holmes gives Rezia a sedative to prevent her from grasping what has happened. His “predatory interest in [her], alone and poor, her escape blocked by the doctor’s body” (Rosenfeld 153), foreshadows her likely future in England, with no recourse to safety. Given her earlier attempts to deny and suppress emotion, however, sedation may be her most effective means of contending with her husband’s death. Across town, Clarissa

Dalloway is awake and alert, rejuvenated when she overhears Sir Bradshaw tell of the suicide of a strange young man. She is unafraid to acknowledge tragedy, to arrest the procession of events that night and consider the ramifications on her life of another human being. “This is why death comes to Clarissa’s party, of all the parties in London: because she can admit it; because she lets it in” (Froula, “Mourning” 138). Like Septimus, she is unaccountably moved by the ordinary— flowers, her green dress, a luncheon invitation that does not involve her. Like Rezia, she fears divulging too much of herself to those around her. Married to Richard, she weds the two extremes, with the psychological freedom to contemplate a mind unhinged amid the trappings of conventional society, her party.

64

Another Modernism

Others in the novel are less fortunate, for Septimus’s effect on Clarissa renders him

“England’s scapegoat for World War I” (DiBattista qtd. in McPherson 140). With Septimus dead, the British ruling class has swiftly rid itself of an irritating reminder of war, much as it erected thousands of memorials to dead soldiers while reviling the living veterans in its midst.41

The question remains as to whether the younger generation, Elizabeth Dalloway, Miss Kilman,

or the postwar governing class will be similarly capable of inviting death and the past into their

lives, like Clarissa, in order to effect change. Elizabeth loves dogs, like her father, wears pink, as

Sally once did, yet lacks her mother’s interest in everyday life and never considers the poor. Her

character portends the myriad choices awaiting her when she finally leaves home. Whether she

retreats into conformity or fulfills one of her myriad daydreams, her respectable family is sure to

assist her along the way.

Instead of a family, Lucrezia Smith has a skill, millinery, which may or may not garner

her a living wage. She is “alone, childless and homeless now in a foreign country. [. . .]

Lucrezia’s double inability to express herself as a woman and as an Italian is as strong and

profound as Septimus’s shell shock” (Usui 158). While Peter and Sally criticize Clarissa for

succumbing to convention, Lucrezia foreshadows the consequences inflicted on women who

stray, intentionally or not, from the accepted path of marriage and motherhood. For poor and

nonconformist women, Victorian ideals of femininity live on, exemplified in the early novels of

Jean Rhys, which portray the ignominy, despair, even death that comes from valuing women

according to their sexual or marital status.

41 “In the early 1920s, ‘memorial tributes and ‘unveilings’ continued throughout England [. . .], almost all without reference to survivors of trench warfare [. . .]. Seemingly having all but disappeared from the street, veterans were overlooked by 1923. [. . .] Victims of the war were seen to have no life at all, no existence.” Levenback, Great War 39, 58. 65

Chapter Two: “Cut to an Echo”: Jean Rhys’s Immutable Modernity

Unlike Mrs. Dalloway’s Rezia Smith, marginalized women in the novels of Jean Rhys do not risk entering a nihilistic space when their marriages end. They inhabit such a space already and remain there after their short-lived, unhappy relationships draw to a close. Marriage may provide brief respite from sadness, boredom, or hunger, yet the women eventually return alone to cold, dank rooms indistinguishable from the ones they left. While Virginia Woolf came to envision an influential female society of outsiders,1 Rhys paints a devastating picture of nonconformist women, in whom the modernist impulse to “make it new” becomes inverted.2

The past does not dwell “side by side with the present,” as it does for Clarissa Dalloway, but is

“altered and cut to an echo” in Rhys’s novels, depleted of the potential to illuminate the present and render the future less terrifying (Rhys, Letters 24, 149). Nor does marriage alter the lives of

Rhys’s women, who do not establish homes, raise children, or otherwise venture outside their own fractured psyches. Rather, they reach a state of existential nothingness that crests and collapses the moment they marry.3 A catalyst for change, marriage soon negates itself, absent in

1 Woolf’s Outsiders’ Society, theorized in Three Guineas, would consist of the daughters of educated men who, rather than join male society and perpetuate patriarchal violence and oppression, would effect change by refusing to participate in militarism of any kind. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). 2 In The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner cites “make it new” as Ezra Pound’s translation of a Chinese phrase in Canto 53 of The Cantos. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1971) 448. Pound invoked the phrase to enjoin his contemporaries to incorporate the work of their predecessors while creating “art as distinct from ‘the other arts.’” The artist with the “ ‘organising’ or creative-inventive faculty [. . .] is a being infinitely separate from the other type of artist who merely goes on weaving arabesques out of other men’s units of form.” Ezra Pound, “As for Imagisme,” Selected Prose: 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973) 347. I quote Pound to foreground my discussion of Rhys’s modernism, in which characters cannot comply with the injunction to make it new; that is, they neither break fully from the past nor utilize it to construct a viable identity for themselves. 3 I adapt the Sartrian understanding of existentialism in my discussion of Rhys: that the determinant of human actions is freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism attempts to reveal to human consciousness its strength and courage to accept the absurdity of existence as well as its capacity for creating meaning in a meaningless world. Sartre views the Nothingness of human existence as a starting point from which to move courageously forward toward meaning. Rhys, conversely, situates her female characters firmly within the Nothingness, prohibiting their forward motion. As Helen E. Nebeker says, “Rhys wrestles masterfully with existentialism, that canker in the soul of twentieth century man; the realization that ‘nothing matters’ because ‘nothing matters’” (156). Helen E. Nebeker, 66

the novels yet infiltrating each one via the heroine’s recollections and fantasies. Seeming, once

it ends, never to have happened at all, marriage signifies the Promethean existence of women on

society’s outskirts. No smooth, healthy flesh ever covers their wounds, however. Instead they

remain exposed to degradation and despair.

Setting the Tone

Ill-fated marriages in Rhys’s novels link the disparate environments she experienced in

her lifetime: her childhood spent on the island of Dominica and later years in Paris and London.

Like Woolf, Rhys was raised on Victorian mores, yet their transplantation from England to the

Caribbean resulted in even greater artificiality.4 As tormenting to Rhys as having to wear wool

clothing in blistering heat were her family’s Victorian codes of silence and repression. Even

while envisioning England as the fairy-land of her schoolbooks, she came to perceive “an

inauthentic, nostalgic clinging to dominant values that is inappropriate to the colonial setting”

(Gardiner, “Exhilaration” 137). If the Bloomsbury Group clung to certain holdovers from the

past, Rhys abhorred anything smacking of Victorianism, including a legacy left to her by a

female relative—to spite the rest of the family, she later learned.5 Rhys’s true “inheritance was

one of ruins, dispossession and estrangement in the country where she was born” (Howells 22),

and more grievous encounters in the European cities of her adulthood.

“The Artist Emerging.” Critical Perspectives on Jean Rhys. Ed. Peirette M. Frickey (Boulder: Three Continents Press, 1990) 148-49. 4 “There they were, marooned on a tiny hostile island,” writes Carole Angier of Rhys’s family, “its total population 30,000 souls and only 300 of them white [. . .]. Dominica was owned by England, but it was not English. [. . .] Dominica resented England” (5). Belonging to a despised minority race, Rhys internalized the hatred engulfing her and longed for acceptance by Dominica’s black residents, in her view more accepting and loving than the white community. Her romanticizing of Dominica’s black population was tempered by the family servants’ contempt for the Rees Williamses and by black schoolmates loath to play with her. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990). 5 Rhys was outspoken in her contempt for English laws of inheritance. In a 1935 letter to author and friend Evelyn Scott, she writes, “I ought to be rather pleased really, Leslie has got hold of some money in the usual way I mean 67

Sent “back” to England for an education in accordance with colonial practice, Rhys found

herself in a foreign land at age 18 without family or finances. She despised England from the

moment she arrived, equating it with brutality and coldness, and embarked on a hand-to-mouth

existence that would somehow sustain her for the next 70 years.6 “To start out on her own in

England after the protected, insular life in Dominica was a fearful experience, and one that she never quite got over” (Staley, Jean Rhys 5). She is compared to other writers in exile such as

Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, yet theirs was a chosen condition considered paramount to

their creativity. Rhys was forced into exile years before she felt compelled to write, and she did

not look homeward to critique what was left behind. Instead she scrutinizes her new location,

reversing an Anglo literary tradition of portraying English physical and psychological decline in

foreign locales. In Rhys’s work, the voyage to England triggers a downward spiral.

Voyage in the Dark

Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark (1934) undergoes such an experience.7 An easily frightened, anxious child, she is particularly vulnerable to the horrors that await her overseas.

Set in the years just before World War I, the novel portrays England’s exploitation of women denied admittance to respectable society, women whose lives the young Sally Seton in Mrs.

somebody else has died (I always think that alone is enough to prove how rotten the whole system is).” Jean Rhys, The Letters of Jean Rhys, eds. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (New York: Viking, 1984) 27. 6 Judith Kegan Gardiner discusses the unique experience of colonial expatriate women writers such as Jean Rhys, stating, “Because England was unknown to them and alien to their immediate experiences, these writers were able to see English culture critically and to feel its domination as arbitrary, unjust, and foreign [. . .]. being a colonial-in- exile [. . .] puts into play an oscillation whereby no place is home; home is ambiguous and ambivalent” (134). Judith Kegan Gardiner, “The Exhilaration of Exile: Rhys, Stead, Lessing,” Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill, London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 7 Although Voyage in the Dark is the third of Rhys’s four early novels, I examine it first in accordance with Diana Athill’s rationale for doing so: “It was written in a first version long before [Rhys] wrote anything else; and its central figure, Anna Morgan, is very young, having been created out of experiences which her author underwent within a few years of coming to school in England in 1907.” Diana Athill, ed. Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1985) ix. In addition, I believe the character of Anna resembles Lucrezia in Mrs. Dalloway, therefore segueing from my preceding chapter. 68

Dalloway can regret only in the abstract. That Anna never marries, that is, never becomes integrated into British society, displays the construction and manipulation of an outsider class to prop up the powerful. Voyage in the Dark contains no functioning marriages, just a remnant of

one in Anna’s appalling stepmother, Hester. Rhys depicts instead the patriarchy’s ruin of the

defenseless in its midst: poor, unmarried women.

A recent immigrant from an Anglo family in the West Indies, 19-year old Anna supports

herself as a chorus girl, has an affair with a wealthy older man, and slips into prostitution when

their relationship ends. That her roles as mistress and prostitute differ little from each other

illustrates England’s rigid categorization of women as wife, mistress, or whore.8 Parameters

inside each category are also narrowly construed, for even early twentieth-century feminists

viewed a prostitute as “either passive victim of seduction, betrayal, or economic hardship, eager

to be reformed [. . .] and/or evil unrepentant woman bent on vicious immorality. The woman

who had temporarily and voluntarily drifted into prostitution was inconceivable within this

ideological framework” (Bland 118). Anna Morgan becomes this uncategorizable person when,

mid-way through the novel, the woman in the room above hers persuades her to be a

“manicurist” in her massage parlor.9

Anna is a virgin as the novel starts, however, and receives object lessons from women in

the chorus more experienced than she. After she sleeps with her lover, Walter Jeffries, Anna

gets advice from her friend Maudie. “ ‘If he’s a rich man and he’s keeping you,’” she says, “

‘you ought to make him get you a nice flat up West somewhere and furnish it for you’” (Voyage

8 As Helen E. Nebeker states (of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, but her description is appropriate to Voyage in the Dark as well), “In this Victorian milieu, man’s superior role was clearly defined. Woman, man’s adjunct, was at once his creation, his wife, his servant or his mistress. Man’s role was certain, secure; woman’s was predictable, but tenuous and stifling.” “The Artist Emerging” (148-9). 9 One review of Voyage in the Dark “recommended [the novel] to ‘those well-balanced women of normal resource who “cannot understand” how any girl ever takes to the streets for a living, and also to those who sentimentalise over those who do” (qtd. in Angier 335). 69

in the Dark 27). Her friend Laurie is more practical, an unabashed “tart” self-protective enough

to save half the money that men give her.10 The chorus “girls” possess more survival skills than

Anna and a shrewd understanding of life on the lower rungs of British society. Maudie manipulates her affairs with men, or tries to, while Laurie anticipates a less dependent future for

herself. Conversely, Anna is absorbed by her environment even while reading about it in Zola’s

Nana. Maudie loathes the novel, convinced that “a man writing a book about a tart tells a lot of

lies one way and another” (V 4-5), particularly in a society viewing unmarried women as

sexually degenerate, outside the norm and deserving no regard.

Prewar England nevertheless saw growing numbers of suffragettes, many of whom chose

alternatives to marriage, such as remaining single or living in free unions.11 Anna Morgan is not

among them, fantasizing instead about quitting her unglamorous job and marrying a rich man.

Convinced of her inferiority to such men, she dares not articulate her desires, and her silence

only exacerbates her objectification by others. Naïve and emotionally fragile, she proves an easy

target, more so because of her occupation as a chorus girl, linked to prostitution by many in

England at the time.12 It is Anna’s misfortune that she must find work with no family, education,

or money on which to rely.13 With her father deceased and her stepmother bilking her

inheritance, she provides for herself in one of the few ways available and is scorned for doing so.

When she appears one day in beautiful new clothes bought with money from Jeffries— before

10 “ ‘Laurie’ was what is now known as a call girl [. . .] tough, worldly wise, a go getter, all there and so on [. . .] really concentrated on herself and her own affairs on making her life a success.” Rhys, Letters 227. 11 Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (New York: The New Press, 1995) 150. 12 Edward J. Bristow writes that in pre-war England, proliferating anti-vice reforms launched their attacks on prostitutes by going after women in the theater “due to the long historical association between prostitution and the stage.” Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain Since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, Rowan and Littlefield, 1977) 26-7. 13 As Wendy Brandmark explains, “The Rhys heroine’s professions—chorus girl, mannequin, model and even mistress—are ones in which she must be self-effacing. [. . .] Yet these were the sort of choices available to unmarried women who were neither highly educated nor rich.” Wendy Brandmark, “The Power of the Victim: A Study of Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie and Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys,” Kunapipi, 8.2 (1986) 23. 70

they sleep together—her landlady reaches the typical conclusion —“I don’t want no tarts in my house” (V 18)—and threatens to evict her.

Fear and suspicion of prostitution were rampant in England and adapted as a theme in

several novels of the time. In the tale of another young woman journeying to a foreign land,

Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, “prostitution is exposed as an ideological tool for keeping

middle-class women confined to marriage, maternity, and feminine occupations” (Marshik 864).

Those standing to benefit from oppressing women had ample opportunity to do so. In the early

1900s, “there were 8,000 prostitutes then in London, a figure that would put the trade well beyond its Victorian peak” (Bristow 154-5), as well as explain Anna’s landlady’s censure of her young female tenant. Because Anna is not married, a mother, or engaged in traditional feminine pursuits, she is insulted even by strangers. “ ‘Well, the dirty tyke!’” Maudie says of a street preacher shouting at her and Anna to repent for their sins. “ ‘Insulting us just because we haven’t got a man with us. I know these people, they’re careful who they’re rude to” (V 29), she says, well aware of England’s power structure.

Anna’s West Indian accent does not escape notice, either, and compounds the prejudice

against her, as Britons connect her patois with national difference and racial inferiority. “ ‘I don’t

hold with the way you go on,’” her landlady says. “ ‘You and your drawly voice’” (V 17-8).

Anna’s speech is part of a discourse Rhys creates to expose and compensate for the limits of

patriarchal language. Her spare prose speaks for mocked and degraded women who will not or

cannot speak for themselves, a remarkable feat, as her own voice caused her such grief she

eventually never spoke above a whisper.14 Teachers and schoolmates in England ridiculed the

teenage Rhys’s “nasty, sing-song nigger’s voice,” saying her horrible accent would prohibit her

from ever becoming an actress (Angier 46). Her characters undergo similar torment because of 71 their voices, attacked and silenced by a hostile language adapted by women as well as men. She had “an English lady’s voice with a sharp, cutting edge to it,” Anna says of Hester. “Speak up and I will place you at once. Speak up, for I fear the worst. That sort of voice” (V 35). Anna responds with an inner voice that might cultivate a healthier consciousness in a privileged woman. Engulfed in the ordeal that is England for the poor and female, however, she cannibalizes her psyche by dwelling on macabre childhood memories.

Caribbean Nightmares

The vagaries of British colonialism destroy Anna’s innocence long before she reaches

England. A lonely child, she yearns for friendship with her family’s young black servant,

Francine, yet the island’s distorted racial conditions prevent such a relationship. On one occasion, Anna wanders toward the family’s kitchen, twenty yards from the house, and peers warily in at Francine, toiling in the stifling, smoke-filled space. Francine returns Anna’s gaze and looks away, uninterested. “I knew that of course she disliked me too,” Anna thinks,

“because I was white; and that I would never be able to explain to her that I hated being white.

[. . .] I felt I was more alone than anybody had ever been in the world before” (V 44-5). She is also disturbed and confused by the contradictions within her home: her uncle’s illegitimate children of color, whom he acknowledges and provides for, alongside her family’s use of racial slurs and dread of the island’s black residents.15 At once lush, colorful, and fragrant as well as hot, hostile, and threatening, the Caribbean represents no idyll to Anna; rather she resurrects

14 Angier 50. 15 Angier writes, “Kindness to one’s illegitimate half-black relations is a touchstone for [Rhys] in both her West Indian novels, an infallible way of distinguishing the smug snobs and prancing hypocrites from brave and decent people.” Well into the twentieth century on Dominica, “white children were still made to cross the street when their illegitimate coloured relations were approaching” (Angier 357). 72

childhood memories to distract her from her life in London. Instead of providing refuge, her memories worsen her cultural and linguistic confusion.

As Virginia Woolf locates connections between British colonialism and misogyny, Rhys

similarly recognizes Anglo notions of otherness, damaging to women and colonial subjects alike.

While male modernists such as D.H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford “began to enact a new

discourse of sexuality [. . .] that invisibly repositioned the (male) body in relation to sex, while

maintaining a fierce inspection and pathologization of the female body” (Kineke 284), Rhys

underscores how such discourse erodes female identity. As “late nineteenth- and early twentieth-

century medical, literary, and painterly discourses [. . .] collapsed the categories of race, female

sexuality and disease into one another” in portrayals of the Hottentot Venus, a “black and white,

whore and virgin binary logic” emerged in early twentieth-century Anglo culture (Kineke 284).

According to such logic, dark-skinned or foreign prostitutes were considered worse than those

presumed to be white. Even the chorus girls display such a bias, nicknaming Anna the

“Hottentot.”

Anna Morgan’s Dominican background permits Rhys to respond to Anglo-European

prejudice more so than if Anna were a “real” Englishwoman. Another of Rhys’s unhappy

Caribbean immigrants to England is Selina, the mulatta protagonist of the short story “Let Them

Call It Jazz.” Imprisoned on a drunk and disorderly charge, Selina refuses to eat, leading the

female warden to ask her sarcastically if she is hunger striking.16 Along with revealing her

awareness of suffragette tactics, Rhys presents society’s determination to denigrate women who

look or sound different from the white, moneyed majority. Unfortunately Selina’s means of

defense physically ruins her, just as Anna’s accelerates her psychological decline.

16 Jean Rhys, Jean Rhys: The Collected Short Stories (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987) 171. 73

Coming from a professional Anglo family in the West Indies, Anna should be succored

once in England. Instead she elicits resentment and distrust by reminding the English of their

failing colonial project. The British link her not with their own Isles but with their conception of

the Caribbean, a wild, volatile place whose women are sexually deviant. Having left the West

Indies, she “no longer holds the clear cut position of imperialist and she is seen here not as the colonizer essential to England’s global enterprise but as an outsider, disconnected from an essential English identity” (Lewis 85). Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) explains how such

identity is constructed, as does Rhys’s depiction of England’s abuse of the powerless. Said

coined the term Orientalism to denote the Western world’s fabrication and dissemination of

information about non-Anglo people and cultures. With no basis in fact, “cultural generalization

[. . .] acquire[d] the armor of scientific statement and the ambience of corrective study” (149).

England’s similarly erroneous concepts of women’s sexuality sanction the abuse of women like

Anna.

Particularly relevant to Orientalism and Voyage in the Dark is late-Victorian hysteria

over white slavery, generally defined as the “abduction of girls and women by deception or force

to brothels, including brothels abroad” (Bland 297). Although documented cases of white

slavery exist, most lurid tales of girls spirited away in the night were fabricated to garner support

for harsher laws against prostitutes. “While public sympathy was forthcoming to the image of

‘innocent’ girls compelled into the ‘social evil,’” Lucy Bland explains, “it was unlikely to extend to what was, in fact, the far more likely occurrence—the prostitute who fell for a false offer of

lucrative work” (297). Rhys dismantles stereotype as Anna resorts to prostitution only after

being used and abandoned by English men in England. 74

Instead of assisting an impoverished, poorly educated woman who is by rights one of

their own, the English consign her to the boundaries of society and dare to express shock at the

outcome. Anna’s experience reveals Anglo culpability in the trafficking of women, overturning

Western conceptions of “foreign” hypersexuality. “[M]isdefined by a language and literary

heritage that belong primarily to propertied men” (Gardiner, “Good Morning” 233), Anna, like

Rhys herself, reflects the need to redefine language denigrating to women.17 Jane Marcus interprets women in exile more broadly. “Feminist theory [. . .] situates the woman writer as the quintessential stranger in the paradise of male letters,” Marcus writes. “She is already in exile by speaking his tongue, so further conditions of exile simply multiply the number of her ‘veils’ and complicate the problem of exegesis” (“Alibis” 270). An exiled woman writing of an exiled woman, Rhys reflects the conundrum of modernism for women who do not fit into preexisting categories.

Anna’s memories of Dominica therefore fail to ease her lonely existence in London,

particularly as she “substitute[s] memory for real human intercourse” (Le Gallez 88). While

Virginia Woolf tunnels into Clarissa Dalloway’s past to encourage her psychological growth,

Jean Rhys resurrects Anna’s Caribbean memories to stress her torment. For Anna, “There is no

waking from this nightmare; instead, both sides are a dream; nothing has become familiar, but all

remains strange” (Gardiner, “Exhilaration” 148). By constantly dredging up the past, Anna

becomes stagnant, limiting her freedom by keeping burdensome experiences alive. To

compensate, she tries at various points to harden herself to others’ cruelty. Meeting Jeffries, she

tries to appear wise to the rules of liaisons between idle rich men and the women they pick up in

17 Woolf’s The Voyage Out also references white slavery. Celia Marshik explains that early twentieth-century readers of the novel “would have recognized South America as one of the main destinations for ‘white slaves’ [. . .]. Trips to the South American continent at this time were viewed as descents into a place of sex and danger.” Celia 75

the street. She is pleased that he looks her in the eye rather than stare at her breasts and legs,

although he too “looked away and smiled as if he had sized me up” (V 7). Dining with him for

the first time, however, she bristles at his haughtiness, sensing that both he and the waiter are

eager to put her down. On holiday with him and another couple, Vincent and Germaine, Anna

resents being the butt of their jokes and stabs a lit cigarette into Jeffries’s hand. The others are

horrified at her violence, although her physical attack is less brutal, and will heal more quickly,

than the upper class’s uncontested psychological and economic assaults upon women.

Wakefulness in England

Anna’s youth, gender, and poverty leave her open to attack from all sides. Germaine, who is French, marvels at the Englishness of misogyny. “ ‘Most Englishmen don’t care a damn about women,’ ” she says. “ ‘They can’t make women happy and they don’t really like them” (V

51), a claim borne out by Walter and Vincent’s shabby treatment of their lovers. Nevertheless

Anna grows to love Jeffries, the only person ever to lavish attention and gifts upon her, care for her when she is ill, and placate her intimidating landladies. Yet because she is childlike as well as disconnected from family and society, Jeffries both coddles her and fears her as a financial liability. As Maudie and Laurie could have predicted, he leaves Anna the moment he feels too entangled in the affair. “As an alien to British culture,” writes Stanford Sternlicht, “poor Anna never understands that men of Jeffries’s class have a rigid, class-defined attitude to women of the working class” and would never marry them (71).

Andrea Lewis similarly explains how Jeffries’s “security in money-based relationships,

coupled with his quintessential Englishness and Anna’s ‘foreignness,’ ensure that Walter’s

Marshik, “Publications and ‘Public Women’: Prostitution and Censorship in Three Novels by Virginia Woolf.” Modern Fiction Studies, 45.4 (1999) 856. 76

relationship with her is never more than a sexually contractual one” (87). Anna does not release

Jeffries from the contract, however, periodically and persistently asking him for money after

their affair has ended. In fact she has long understood the link between money and marriage, for

years earlier, after her mother’s death, her father went to London on business and returned to

Dominica with a new English wife, Hester. After his death, Hester sells the family estate and

cheats Anna of her inheritance, her stepdaughter’s lifestyle providing her with a convenient

pretext for doing so.18

Having never benefited from her family’s money, Anna does not feel its loss.

Nevertheless, without Jeffries, she has no livable income and considers the job offer from an older woman, Ethel Matthews. Although more sexually experienced after her yearlong affair

with Jeffries, Anna still fails to grasp the lengths to which England will go to exploit the poor.

When Ethel shows her the clean, bright room that will be hers if she agrees to work for her, she

sees a refuge from her current squalor, not a bribe for becoming a prostitute. Ethel’s massage

parlor is one of many springing up in England at the time. “At the height of the London

crackdown [on vice], in 1905,” writes Edward Bristow, “the number of females charged with

having sexual intercourse in the open rose to a formidable 944. The legal onslaught [. . .]

contributed to the spread of massage parlors, which then as now provided a whole range of

sexual services” (168-9). Even a single room was considered a brothel if there was suspicion of

sexual activity going on inside, a decree causing the Rhys heroine no end of misery.19

At first Anna is oblivious to the amenities her customers expect. That she soon

cooperates reflects her lack of options rather than enthusiasm for the arrangement. As Elaine

18 Jeffries perceives the nature of Anna’s strife with Hester. “Doesn’t she approve of your gadding about on tour?” he asks Anna. “Does she think you’ve disgraced the family or something?” (Voyage 12). 77

Savory observes, “there is often very little feeling, certainly an absence of joy” in Anna’s sexual encounters (61), although sex does relieve her loneliness from time to time. Throughout Rhys’s fiction, women enjoy their sexuality only where love and trust exist, as in the first few weeks of

Antoinette Cosway and Edward Rochester’s marriage in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).20 Like many modernist novels of the 1930s, however, Voyage in the Dark considers the “transience and unsatisfactoriness in human relations” (Ashcom 18), rather than their potential for growth and stability.

On the surface, Anna appears to do little else than allow a succession of men and women to abuse her. Yet England’s social and moral atmosphere in the years before the First World

War generates the barbarous treatment of unprotected women, particularly when thought to be prostitutes. The Contagious Diseases Act, for instance, exemplifies the “abuses almost inherent in the process of rescuing the abused” (Marcus, “Alibis” 280). Anti-vice groups created the

Contagious Diseases Act in the mid-1800s to clear the streets of prostitutes and shut down brothels. Under the CDA, women were arrested, regardless of whether they were actually prostitutes, subjected to a physical examination, and sent to prison if suspected of carrying and spreading disease.21 Men, on the other hand, were exempt from the CDA, and in fact were encouraged to visit prostitutes or keep mistresses before they married.22 Those fighting to repeal the CDA “asserted that prostitution was a by-product of a morality that made women chattels

19 As stated in A Manual of Vigilance Law (1923), ‘A brothel [. . .] need not be a whole house, and may be a single room.” Wyndham A. Bewes, A Manual of Vigilance Law, Fourth Edition. Ed. Lieut.-Colonel G. Thompson (London: The National Vigilance Association, 1923) 49. 20 Thomas Staley writes that “No male-female sexual act is ever described in any detail in Rhys’s fiction, and in them, where the woman is always passive, there is an absence of sensuality.” He neglects several scenes in Wide Sargasso Sea, however—portrayals of Antoinette’s awakening sexuality and her and Rochester’s sexual pleasure in each other, albeit short-lived. Thomas Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979) 81. 21 Cate Haste, Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain: World War I to the Present (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992) 14. 22 Bland 60. 78

through limiting their economic opportunities and endorsing their complete dependence on men”

(Haste 14).

Closing brothels and clearing the streets of prostitutes left hundreds of women and

children homeless. They were offered assistance only if they promised to leave the streets and

“lead an honourable and honest life” (William Coote qtd. in Bland 103), which few were willing

to do for fear of being further degraded. Of the CDA’s tactics, the “Personal Rights Journal

sarcastically commented: ‘It is difficult to say whether the bravery of a powerful society,

cramming homeless and helpless girls into a hospital where surgical outrage . . . awaits them, or

the eccentricity of those who were not willing to accept such protection, is the more remarkable’

” (qtd. in Bland 104). Without her comfortable room in Ethel’s flat, Anna fears ending up in

another decrepit room run by another hostile landlady. It was not wickedness but the horrific living conditions among England’s lower classes that led women into prostitution and fed their

distrust of reforms.

Nor are prostitutes society’s only defeated women. Ethel Matthews preys on helpless

young girls, but as a single, aging woman, she too faces ruin. She brags of her self-sufficiency

yet depends for her living on men’s exploitation of women. Although hateful to Anna, using her

and arbitrarily raising her rent, her behavior stems from her terror of growing old with no money.

Having first met Anna in a wretched rooming house, she is no stranger to deprivation. She

resembles Mrs. Dalloway’s Ellie Henderson, another older woman obsessed with her dire

financial straits.23 A cog in the patriarchal machine that victimizes women, Ethel clings to the

23 Clarissa Dalloway grudgingly invites her cousin, Ellie Henderson, to her party. Once there, Ellie feels “her panic fear, which arose from three hundred pounds income, and her weaponless state (she could not earn a penny) and it made her timid and more and more disqualified year by year to meet well-dressed people who did this sort of thing every night of the season, merely telling their maids, ‘I’ll wear so and so.’” Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1925) 185. 79 massage parlor and the money it brings despite the constant risk of arrest.24 She spends her waning years in fear of losing her livelihood, the only thing standing between her and poverty— and a riskier, less lucrative form of prostitution. She warns Anna to be discreet when coming and going, for the man in the downstairs office is “ ‘an awful old cat. You can understand I don’t want to give him any chance of turning me out of here,’” she says (V 95-6). She also homes in on Anna’s friend Laurie as another potential recruit. The insanity of their position makes Ethel cruel, while Anna despairs of achieving a better life. Both remain stuck in a sexual and economic morass. Ethel probably drowns in it; Anna certainly does.

A Working Woman

When Anna’s first regular customer, Carl Redman, divulges that he is married, she is fascinated and presses him for details. He refuses to talk, however, intent upon keeping his wife and daughter separate from the seedier side of his life. He and other men, meanwhile, are free to roam the city for sexual encounters, rendering Anna and women like her “necessary to the perpetuation of the ‘decent’ world” (Nebeker, “Artist Emerging” 102). Like Richard Dalloway and Peter Walsh leering at women as they go about their day, Redman is unaware of how lascivious male behavior degrades all women, constructing false categories and forcing women into unnatural roles, such as Anna’s as sexual commodity.25

With several steady customers, Anna saves a bit of money and dreams of leaving

London. Her plans always unravel, however, as when she loans her old friend Maudie eight pounds, a generous act that sends her back to Ethel’s flat for more work. She tries intermittently

24 “Every female who is proved to have for the purposes of gain exercised control, direction or influence over the movements of a prostitute, in such a manner as to show that she is aiding, abetting, or compelling her prostitution with any person, or generally, shall be guilty of an offence under the Vagrancy Act, 1898.” Bewes 27. 25 Le Gallez (101) and Druxes (11) are among critics who discuss the commodification of women in Rhys’s fiction. 80

to change or resist her situation, but only half-heartedly and cynically. She laughs at her absurd

life, a sign that she may finally be nearing an existential sense of her own freedom. Yet as Helga

Druxes explains, even if “Rhys’s protagonists recognize their victimization as exchange objects

between men [they] are still so implicated in disciplinary body regimes that they cannot break

free from commodification practices. Their energy for rebellion exhausts itself in brief furious

physical and verbal lashing out” (23). Anna burns Jeffries’s hand with the cigarette. She

imagines her bracelet as a knuckle-duster to smash the face of a stranger. Back at the massage parlor, she smacks the bandaged wrist of a customer who will not let her go. A moment beforehand, she hurls her shoe at a framed picture over her bed. Entrenched in the ugly business of selling herself, her physical decline keeps pace with—and surpasses—her psychological disintegration. Realizing she is pregnant with no way of identifying the father, she takes potions

and pills to end the pregnancy, tormenting herself with visions of the monster she carries: “No eyes, perhaps….No arms, perhaps” (V 103). After suffering for six months, she obtains an illegal abortion with help from Jeffries, who once again relies on money to solve problems, never stopping to consider the fundamental causes of women’s poverty.

Jeffries’s faith in “a code that makes emotional and economic things exchangeable”

(Comley and Scholes 27) comes full circle, from slipping money into Anna’s purse after they

first sleep together to paying to abort a pregnancy resulting from more bartered sex. When the

woman “doctor” botches the abortion, it is unclear whether Anna lives or dies. Rhys suggests

the latter option may be best. “This girl is an innocent,” she writes in a letter of 1963. “Really

without guile or slyness. Why should she live and be done in over and over again?” (Letters

237) In the original ending of Voyage in the Dark, Anna dies. Fearing such a depressing work

would garner few sales, Rhys’s husband and publisher convinced her to change the conclusion, 81

or at least make it ambiguous. Under duress, Rhys made the suggested change, yet the revised

ending is even more fatalistic.26 As Anna lies in bed hemorrhaging, “her dream takes her

entirely, so perhaps that is the reality,” Rhys writes (Letters 241)—a reality from which her mind

retreats ever farther while her body, were it to heal, would only undergo more abuse. In Mrs.

Dalloway, death frees Septimus Warren Smith from his despair, as it frees Antoinette from hers

in the conflagration at the end of Wide Sargasso Sea.27 If Anna does live at the conclusion of

Voyage in the Dark, she suffers her despair unendingly.

Quartet

The heroine of Rhys’s first novel, Quartet (1929), is several years older than Anna but no

better equipped for life on society’s fringes. While Anna briefly fantasizes about marriage,

Quartet’s Marya Zelli learns that being married is as dangerous to women as remaining single.

Imprisoned after his dubious financial dealings catch up with him, Marya’s husband Stephan is powerless to protect his wife from predators. In fact, he fails to do so even before he is sent away, for as the novel begins, Marya leaves a café alone, her appearance, perhaps drunkenness, eliciting lewd suggestions from men and boys nearby. After Stephan’s arrest, she is increasingly prey to others’ assumptions about her sexuality. Alone with no money, indolent and passive, she

26 Carole Angier reprints both concluding paragraphs in her biography of Rhys. “The last paragraph of the original ending had been: ‘And the concertina music stopped it was so still and lovely and it stopped and there was the ray of light along the floor like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out and blackness comes…’ Instead Jean now wrote: ‘When their voices stopped the ray of light came in again under the door like the last thrust of remembering before everything is blotted out. I lay and watched it and thought about starting all over again. And about being new and fresh. And about mornings, and misty days, when anything might happen. And about starting all over again, all over again…’” Angier finds the second ending superior to the first. Had Anna died, she believes, Voyage in the Dark would have been “a more clichéd and sentimental novel” (Angier 295). 27 I agree with Carole Angier, who sees “the end of Wide Sargasso Sea [as] a triumph. At last the heroine escapes the prison of her madness and solitude; at last she stops uselessly, insanely willing reality to conform to her dream, and sets out instead to do what she has dreamed of” (Angier 383). 82 is drawn into a disturbing relationship with a couple whose own dysfunctional marriage relies on infidelity to survive.

Like Anna Morgan, Marya supports herself as a chorus girl when she first leaves home.

By the time she meets Stephan, she has been living “her hard and monotonous life very mechanically and listlessly” (Quartet 16). With no skills or prospects, she is among countless lower-class English women seeking marriage as a way out of poverty and tedium.28 She tells

Stephan immediately that she has no money and that her parents are dead, divulging the information less from honesty than resignation to her unhappy life. He offers to pay her debts, stating, “It’s better when a woman has some money, I think. It’s much safer for her” (Q 19), both ruing and exploiting women’s destitution. Instead of achieving wealth and security upon marrying, Marya soon learns she has traded one cheap hotel room for another, with the added worry of rarely knowing her husband’s whereabouts or source of income. She and Stephan marry “in a time when respectable middle-class wives or those aspiring to middle-class status were to be supported by their husbands” (Sternlicht 38). Because neither of them plays an orthodox role in society, however, their marriage falls far short of such an ideal. As Helen

Nebeker explains, the marriage is “doomed since it has no economic basis, a prerequisite in the

Victorian vision” persisting in interwar Europe (Passage 6).

Husbands and Wives

With Stephan often away, Marya spends her days roaming the back streets of

Montparnasse, “full of shabby parfumeries, second-hand book-stalls, cheap hat-shops, bars frequented by gaily-painted ladies and loud-voiced men, midwives’ premises” (Q 7-8). She wanders around to relieve her boredom, but in the process elicits her husband’s wrath. He scolds 83

her when she ventures out of their room alone, accusing her of drifting into sordid activities.

Marya agrees to stay inside with only books to distract her, her belief that Stephan will return each night providing her only solace. Even this small comfort eludes her when she learns he has been arrested. Her fears and disappointments in marriage to Stephan are among “a host of horrors lurking behind the veneer of marital respectability” (Bland 146).

Suddenly free to roam again when Stephan is sent to prison, Marya grows wary, for his absence this time is of a different sort, more ominous and shameful. Paris now seems sinister.

Outside, she feels “if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. [. . .] You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn’t argue. It went too deep” (Q 33), she thinks, preferring to keep it hidden, thus eradicating a slim opportunity for self-discovery. With a degree of self-awareness, she might recognize her sense of foreboding as part of her nature, a recognizable element within herself from which to move forward and begin to construct an identity. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, humankind’s fundamental predicament lies in realizing freedom only through dread. Iris

Murdoch writes that Sartre’s “novels and plays have a strictly didactic purpose. They are intended to make us conscious of this predicament, so that we may pursue sincerely and with open eyes our human metier of understanding our world and conferring meaning upon it” (104).

Marya, however, suppresses her instincts and ignores her reality, her sense of fear leading her to exchange her luckless marriage for one so meticulously constructed she stands no chance against it.

Marya may be “reckless, lazy, a vagabond by nature” (Q 14), but her experiences with

H.J. and Lois Heidler, a wealthy Englishman and his artist wife, have more to do with the

28 Elaine Savory, Jean Rhys (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 24. 84

selfishness of the rich and powerful than with her own faults. Dining with them, Marya feels

uncomfortable and out of place with such sturdy, self-assured people. Later, when H.J.’s “huge

hand lay possessively, heavy as lead, on her knee” (Q 13), she knows what will happen. In Mrs.

Dalloway Rezia touches Septimus’s knee to calm him, to bring him back to reality. H.J. maneuvers for sexual and psychological control when he paws at Marya.

Lois’s orchestration of the affair between her husband and Marya reveals her own

marriage as primarily economic in nature, an exchange system in which H.J. compensates her

financially for the emotional pain he causes her.29 She abets her husband’s affairs rather than

risk a divorce and becoming another of Paris’s impoverished women. Her fear compels her

aberrant behavior, such as inviting Marya into her home to satisfy her husband and deflect the

rumors circulating about the break-up of her marriage. Soon everyone knows of the

arrangement, however, and believes as well that under the circumstances, the mistress should

bear the blame. Lois basks in the “atmosphere of sympathy and encouragement” (Q 85) that

surrounds her when she, H.J., and Marya are out in public, compensation perhaps as gratifying as

Heidler’s paychecks. Emboldened by her friends’ support, Lois can assert her control over

Marya.

“ ‘Let’s go to Luna-park after dinner,’ she says to H.J. ‘We’ll put Mado [Marya] on the joy wheel, and watch her being banged about a bit. Well, she ought to amuse us sometimes; she ought to sing for her supper; that’s what she’s here for, isn’t it?’ Heidler’s face was expressionless” (Q 85). He abandons Marya to the open derision of Lois and her friends, although Lois soon swears Marya to secrecy. “ ‘Who could I talk to?’ asked Marya in an

29 I describe the Heidlers’ marriage in terms adapted from Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text, by Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). In a chapter on Hemingway’s female characters, Comley and Scholes discuss Hemingway’s life and fiction as constructed upon a code of 85

aggressive voice” (Q 107). Heidler has already forbidden her to see the only other person she

knows in Paris, the American writer Cairn, the one man who is kind to her without asking for sex

in return. Initially eager to have her friends join her in ridiculing Marya, Lois grows increasingly

ashamed and tries to retreat behind a façade of normalcy, which disgusts Marya even more. Lois

is like all the other hypocrites, Marya thinks, who “[p]retend that there is no such thing as this petty, leering, unsplendid cruelty, this damnable dropping of water on the same place for years.

This mean bloody awful hatred of everything that isn’t exactly like their mean self,” as Rhys puts

it, in one of many invectives against (in)humanity (Letters 31). In fact Lois appreciates just how alike she and Marya really are, that she too could easily slide into poverty and dissipation.

The Heidlers’ marriage is predicated upon Lois’s conviction that men’s desires supercede

women’s. She “bases her entire life on whatever the masculine code imposes upon her and as a

result is a dehumanized accessory, who must play the servant’s role at best, and at worst the

pimp” (Staley, “Emergence” 146). She brutalizes women, competitors for resources obtainable

only from men. Like Clarissa Dalloway, she fears she is frigid, yet having suffered the

emotionally deadening effects of her husband’s affairs, she cannot respond to him sexually

anymore. Her determination to stay married means not only withstanding but also actively

plotting her husband’s extramarital ventures. With European characters, Quartet nevertheless

evinces Rhys’s West Indian sensibilities, for Lois behaves like colonial wives, “expected to be

faithful to their husbands while their husbands had uninhibited access to the Other women of

their world” (Sternlicht 50). She suppresses her sexuality so that H.J.’s might thrive, masking

her insecurities with her deplorable treatment of Marya.30

economic exchange, beginning with his mother’s “model of how emotional qualities may be reduced to economic quantities” (26). 30 The work of psychoanalyst Karen Horney helps explain Lois’s behavior. A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Horney rejects theories of women’s inferiority to men. In a series of debates with Freud, she links women’s 86

To wield power in their marriages, then, women crush other women, particularly “Young, attractive women [. . .] mortal enemies, who must be defeated by a mock surrender, pretended affection, and control” (Sternlicht 33). Lois adopts such a stance toward Marya, for “Among the bourgeoisie, women are only competitors” (Sternlicht 40), destroying each other to maintain a semblance of equitable marriage. Heidler, in turn, subscribes to the double standard that abhors

women’s sexuality and encourages men’s, embodying the “Victorian concept of masculine

sexuality which cannot find fulfillment within the bonds of marriage” (Nebeker, Passage 7). His character complicates Marya’s abjection, for “without Lois and Marya, isn’t Hugh Heidler just a huge stuffy bourgeoisie Englishman whose allegiance is to middle-class society?” (Kraf 124).

Yet the two women compete for this man with the “inexpert, clumsy hands” and “hard mouth”

(Q 118), the “curious underlying expression of obtuseness—even of brutality” (Q 11). At times, their lovemaking soothes Marya. More often, she feels dissatisfied, enduring him out of fear—of poverty, of loneliness, of Lois. He is “Not at all an amiable looking person,” Marya thinks, “But nevertheless [is] not without understanding, for every time that her glass was empty he refilled it” (Q 40). Anna Morgan is slow to realize that the men she dines with try to get her drunk.

Marya, on the other hand, is grateful when men help her numb herself with alcohol.

H.J. Heidler is a product of his times, a firm believer in appearances and maintaining the

status quo. As Elaine Kraf explains, “Most of Jean Rhys’s male characters are robots in their

compulsive allegiance to their social milieu, no matter how meaningless or superficial its values”

seemingly aberrant behavior, such as masochism, directly to male-centered notions of marriage. “She viewed marriage, with its accompanying social ideals of romantic love and monogamy, as responsible for what had previously been diagnosed as inherent physiological/psychological disorders in women” (Emery 115). Because traditional Western marriages insist upon women’s subordination, economic dependence, domesticity, and sexual repression, Horney says, they “destroy women’s chances to establish secure and confident identities or to develop their own voices and points of view.” Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at “World’s End” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990) 115. 87

(120). Heidler accepts society’s arbitrary rules and enjoins Marya to play along. She

understands the rules, having been their lifelong victim, but is ultimately barred from the game.31

H.J. plays masterfully—by pleading ignorance of Marya and Lois’s feelings, by getting drunk after arguments to be exonerated of guilt or remembrance the next day. He tells Marya that “one had to keep up appearances. That everybody had to. Everybody had for everybody’s sake to keep up appearances. It was everybody’s duty, it was in fact what they were there for” (Q 113).

Marya’s resistance—her unwillingness to keep quiet or disappear when the affair gets messy, her ambivalence toward Lois—exasperates him but deflects his repetition of empty conventional mores,32 reflecting to a greater extent than Voyage in the Dark an existential literary convention.

As Hans van Stralen explains, regarding existentialism and modernism in Jean-Paul Sartre’s

Depaysement, “the outcast is often sought out in literary Existentialism, because it is felt that he

has escaped from the ethics of those who only want to be perfunctory or unthinking,” such as

Heidler (227). Rhys disrupts the trope, however, for Marya infiltrates Heidler’s world, much to

his dismay.

Heidler is an unattractive, unkind, second-rate lover. He also has money, social prestige, and the power to render a woman a respectable wife or detestable whore, perhaps both at once.

He knows that his society, and even scientific theory, condones his treatment of women. The writings of renowned British sex theorist Havelock Ellis back up Heidler’s stance. Writing in the

31 Angier notes that although Marya claims she does not know how to play the game, “as time goes on we see that this isn’t quite right. It’s not so much that Marya doesn’t know how to play, as that she doesn’t want to. For really she understands the rules perfectly well: the point is that they are designed to destroy her” (Angier 200-201). 32 Helen E. Nebeker’s description of English society at the time is worth quoting at length. “[I]n this culture which Rhys would have inherited, woman lived in an Aristotelian oriented world of either-or, black-white. Thus, either a woman was a ‘respectable lady’ or she was not. With husband and money, this status was assured. Without these safeguards, the way to respectability might be more difficult but must be found. With luck, the less-than affluent spinster could find refuge within the original family circle of father or brother. Denied this, she might become a servant, knowing her ‘place’ and thereby remaining a ‘lady.’ Or she might, given property by inheritance, keep a ‘decent’ boarding house or become a governess or seamstress or seek employment in a shop or factory. Any of these alternatives, however, promised only the barest existence—dullness, poverty, abasement.” Helen E. Nebeker, 88

late 1800s and early 1900s, Ellis “argued that women’s modesty was central to courtship [. . .]

and reflected the ‘primordial urge’ of the female to be conquered.” He claims, “women required

some element of pain to gain sexual pleasure and their resistance was simply part of the ‘game’

of courtship” (Bland 259).33 Ellis also posits progressive notions of women’s sexuality, finding

marriage “a more fashionable form of prostitution in which women were underpaid,” for

example (Haste 22-3). Unfortunately his more sexist notions often prevailed.

Marya’s Decline

With Stephan in prison and H.J. losing interest, Marya bears the brunt of such prejudice, her world shrinking to the hotel room Heidler occasionally visits for sex. While in “many

Existentialist texts, closed spaces appear which may lead to a confrontation with others” (van

Stralen 227), enclosures in Quartet prohibit meaningful human interaction. Marya feels powerless to change her situation, for “she hadn’t a leg to stand on, really. [Heidler] had everything on his side—right down to the expression on the waiter’s face when he brought up her breakfast” (Q 119). Caught between an ineffectual husband and manipulative lover, Marya reflects how single and married women become abused. Rather than celebrate individuality and nonconformity, then, Rhys’s modernism arises out of West Indian contexts that “operate as implicit critique or ironizing commentary on modern European feminist tradition or European modernism” (Thomas, “Modernity” 186). Rhys has no interest or experience in the rarified world of brilliant male scholars, rich women hosting parties, or genteel families vacillating

Jean Rhys, Woman in Passage: A Critical Study of the Novels of Jean Rhys (Montreal, Canada: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1981) 5. 33 Rachel Blau DuPlessis finds that nineteenth-century women’s literature contributes to such beliefs, with women characters wielding power before they marry, determining the length, course, and tenor of their courtship. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 14. 89

between city and country estates. Her “concern is as separate as she is from the dominant values

which underpin the art and ideology of metropolitan society. She was in the metropolitan centres

and appropriated the terms and theories which gave impulse to the artistic movements, but she

was not of that world” (Gregg, “Voice” 32). Rhys’s lifelong sense of alienation led to narratives

exposing the loathsomeness of the mores of her time. For her heroines, alienation is no catalyst

for art but for poverty, addiction, and sickness.

Marya exemplifies such misery, spending her final days of the affair in delirium in her

hotel. “Though initially displaced into the Paris of the 1920s and bohemian life, supposedly free

of bourgeois prejudices and Victorian attitudes toward marriage and sexuality, Marya finds

herself in a situation resembling Antoinette’s [in Wide Sargasso Sea]—that of a woman driven to

illness and madness or neurosis” (Emery 120). Marya cannot rouse herself to furious action, as

Antoinette does, but suggests the violence she might enact if pushed too far. “‘ You don’t need

to be a fine bouncing girl to stab anybody,’” she says to Lois. “ ‘The will to stab should be the

chief thing, I should think’ ” (Q 87). Even this small assertion meets with disgrace, however, as

a neighboring diner approaches their table, “fixed a severe, slightly bleared blue eye on Marya

and declared that he thought she was a hussy” (Q 87). On the brink of lashing out, Marya backs

down in defeat, her behavior in her marriage and in her affair differing little from each other.

Stephan’s release from prison is therefore no boon. He too chips away at her identity, restricting

her freedom and jeopardizing her life, often disappearing for days at a time, leaving her behind

with no money or food. She accepts his behavior because he is an “expert lover,” she the

“petted, cherished child, the desired mistress, the worshipped, perfumed goddess” (Q 22). In

Marya, Rhys “reveals the dream of the Victorian woman as well as the desire of Victorian man: to see woman as pet, child, mistress, goddess, but never as competent, functioning, secure human 90

who just happens to be female” (Nebeker, Passage 6). At least she and Stephan have each other

to stave off isolation, Marya thinks, remembering her marriage wistfully after her experience

with the Heidlers. Rather than show that the “marriage works in its odd lurching fashion”

(Davidson 66), however, Marya’s nostalgia reflects her despair. That she stays with Stephan for

four years indicates less her acquiescence to the “Victorian ‘good woman’s’ view, the result of a

century of indoctrination” (Sternlicht 43), than that she has nowhere else to go.

Marya panics when Stephan prepares to leave the country without her. To her terror-

induced confession of the affair with Heidler, Stephan responds with perfunctory male outrage,

despite her reminder that he left her no choice, “left me all alone without any money’ ” (Q 184).

Although the Zellis are poor, they too have a marriage founded on economics, with sexual

fidelity ensured only when ample money is available. Pretending to be devastated by Marya’s

betrayal, Stephan encourages it throughout their marriage by withholding money but primarily

by refusing to tell her anything important, anything that might enable her self-sufficiency. For

years he drives her into a position of childlike dependence and fear. Abandoning her in the end, he plays the traditional role of wronged husband, despite his earlier rejection of the traditional

role of provider. H.J.’s return to Lois and Stephan’s desertion of Marya reveal that the “rules of

the game are clearly different for betrayed wives as opposed to betrayed husbands, for straying

men as distinct from straying women” (Davidson 75). Marya is hurt, perhaps killed, by her

husband in the end, ruined by a union that should have protected her. Like Anna Morgan, she

will die or awaken alone, forced to return to the streets and resume her tired cycle of abuse.

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie 91

After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) bears traces of another failed marriage. Like Marya

Zelli, Julia Martin marries to evade boredom and poverty. Prompted by lassitude, the moment

she marries is robbed of the potential for change—a different home, a different person to share

ideas with, a different ego. It is not even a moment of nothingness, which would force a stance

of some kind. Rather it is nothing even before it begins, subsequently bearing no children, no

financial security, and no discernible distinction from the life she tries to leave behind. Julia’s

nothingness turns inward and locks her psychologically into place. She is “stopped and held by

nothingness” (Angier 241, emphasis added), so self-alienated that the void of her existence

exerts its will upon her rather than the other way around.

Throughout the narrative, Julia remains caught in a “pattern [. . .] both familiar and as

unpredictable as a nightmare,” its “ordering principal” an expressionistic pattern of “obsession

and repetition” (Richardson 297).34 As the story begins, she lies in bed, stricken with fear by a

letter from the attorney of her former lover Mackenzie. After living off an allowance from

Mackenzie for the past six months, Julia receives a severance check and learns that no further

payments will be forthcoming. The letter sets off a chain of events, starting with Julia’s

returning the money to Mackenzie and ending with her hunting him down once again to

“borrow” one hundred francs. In between, she meets another man, travels to London, watches

her mother die, suffers an emotional breakdown, argues with her sister, sleeps with several men,

34 Dissatisfied with the academy’s perception of twentieth-century literary history as realism Æ modernism Æ postmodernism, Brian Richardson posits “the history of British fiction in the twentieth century [. . .] as the site of continuous contestation between at least four principal competing narrative poetics—realism, postmodernism, expressionism, and high modernism” (Richardson 293). Although he specifies Good Morning, Midnight as Rhys’s expressionist text, I consider each of her works to bear traces of expressionism according to his definition of the type. Yet I disagree with Richardson’s claim that “the protagonists of [expressionist] works rarely have much of a personal history antecedent to the events recounted on the book’s first page” (298) when discussing Jean Rhys. Each Rhys heroine has a past, particularly Anna, whose Caribbean memories comprise a substantial portion of the narrative of Voyage in the Dark. Brian Richardson, “Remapping the Present: The Master Narrative of Modern Literary History and the Lost Forms of Twentieth-Century Fiction.” Twentieth Century Literature, 43.3 (1997) 291- 309. 92 moves from room to room, returns to Paris—yet nothing changes. Faded memories of her marriage recur to emphasize her stagnation.

After Abandoning Julia Martin

Mr. Mackenzie lives the same self-satisfied life as Heidler, trifling with women until they cease to amuse him, usually by wearying him with their relentless appeals for money. In

Mackenzie, Helen Nebeker observes, “Rhys will develop a major theme. That is, the seeds of man’s essential hatred and fear of woman lie in the financial and emotional demands she makes upon him” (“Emerging” 150). Yet men establish and perpetuate such conditions until money, love, and sex become inextricable in patriarchal England. Wedded to such a construct,

Mackenzie demeans women physically and mentally. He recalls Julia once telling him “that she had married and had left England immediately after the armistice. She had had a child. The child had died—in Central Europe somewhere—and then she had separated from her husband and had divorced him or been divorced by him, Mr. Mackenzie could not gather which”

(Mackenzie 247). To him, the events shaping Julia’s life comprise a tawdry tale whose details he cannot bother to keep straight.

When Julia tells another man, George Horsfield, about her marriage, she says, “I wanted to get away” from dull, gray England. “I wanted it—like iron. [. . .] So I did get away. I married to get away” (M 264). Julia’s relatives doubt whether she was ever married at all. She therefore bears not the stigma of the divorcee but that of the exile, a nonperson refused even temporary admittance to “home and hearth, the womb/home of humankind” (Marcus, “Alibis” 272). She cannot be placed and no place will accept her, for as Jane Marcus explains, regarding the woman artist in exile, “Making something out of nothing makes somewhere out of nowhere, a mimetic 93

of rebirth, childbirth, or self-making [. . .], a process politically and intimately bound up with

domestic labor” (“Alibis” 275). Fleeing the monotony of her life in England, Julia finds poverty

and death in its stead, as her husband loses money, their infant dies, and the marriage quickly dissolves. If, as Marcus states, “the roots of culture [. . .] are in domestic labor” and “ownership has been appropriated by the wrong class and gender” (“Alibis” 284), Julia negates a negation, for wherever she goes, she too is the “wrong” class and gender. She never even tries to go home because she never had one to begin with.

Julia’s ten days in London, paid for with money from Horsfield, prove worse than she

had imagined. Her relatives dread her arrival, assuming correctly that she comes to cadge

money. Her Uncle Griffiths wonders why the ex-husband gives her no money, and grills Julia

about why he deserted her. “‘He didn’t leave me,’ argued Julia. ‘I left him.’ ‘Nonsense,’” he

says (M 279), convinced that men leave marriages, not women, especially men tied down to

women like Julia. Defending her marriage, Julia remembers the expensive presents her husband

gave her, linking love with money despite the grievous consequences for women of such an equation. Uncle Griffiths loathes Julia for shaming the family, yet he too defied convention at

one time.

Griffiths has a “second wife,” the narrative states, whom he met “at a small hotel at

Burnham-on-Crouch and had married her without knowing anything about her. It was the one

impulsive action of his life, and he had never regretted it” (M 279). In Rhys’s fiction, only a

certain type of woman resides alone at small hotels, yet Uncle Griffiths chooses one for his wife

with impunity. His action causes no scandal because he is male and brings the woman into his

world rather than descend into hers. Too obtuse to understand that his relationship succeeds

because he married without calculation or economic interest, he has no sympathy for Julia’s 94

similarly unconventional choice of marriage partner. Conditions for women might improve if men spoke out against unfair customs and stereotypes. After expressing a bit of independence, however, Uncle Griffiths retreats into convention.

When Julia arrives at the home of Neil James, her first lover, he echoes Griffiths in

asking suspiciously after the disappeared husband, maintaining the pretense that men faithfully

support the women to whom they were once attached. Julia knows better, which is why she goes

to other men for money. When she tries to explain herself, James shushes her. Like Mackenzie,

he prevents Julia from speaking, loathing her tiresome voice. The three men, Mackenzie,

Griffiths, and James, reflect the insular, moneyed world that lures in vulnerable women and

jettisons them shortly thereafter. Like Anna and Marya before her, Julia denies her reality, in

this instance by comforting herself with female fantasies of male poverty and powerlessness.

She tells Horsfield, “I used to pray that he’d [James] lose all his money, because I imagined that

if that happened I’d see him oftener. And then I’d imagine myself working for him, or somehow

getting money to give him. He’d have thanked me if he’d known what I was praying for,

wouldn’t he?” (M 333-34) As long as James is moneyed and Julia is poor, however, she knows

she “was for sleeping with—not talking to” (M 333).

Horsfield behaves marginally better toward Julia. Initially predatory, he finds her

interesting and is the sole person to listen to her when she speaks. He gives her the money for

London partly to be rid of her, for he desires no disruptions to his own life, yet he sympathizes

with her and believes she should reconnect with her family. He is the only man to see “Julia not

as a representative of the insulted and injured, but as a solid human being” (M 331). As may be

expected, however, he derives pleasure at her expense. Joining her in London, returning with her

to her flat, he warns her that if anyone sees him there, she will surely be evicted, cast into the 95

street for a perceived sexual indiscretion. Meanwhile he will walk away unscathed, at most

suffering a moment of embarrassment should anyone see him leaving her room at dawn.

Being turned out would be nothing new to Julia, whose life is already one of

homelessness regardless of where she lives. She spends her days trying to obtain money to

attract men who will give her more money. Her attempts to look pretty and decent backfire,

however, for her fashionable clothes, bought with money better spent on food and heat, give

others the impression that she is well off, augmenting her relatives’ disgust when she asks them

for cash. She considers selling her fur coat but thinks, “People thought twice before they were

rude to anybody wearing a good fur coat” (M 278). Appearances count for everything in a class- conscious society, but like Anna Morgan of Voyage in the Dark, Julia experiences the double-

edged nature of a respectable outer shell: A well-dressed single woman is generally thought to be someone’s mistress. Her obsession with make-up similarly reinforces class and sex stereotypes, as she forever powders her nose and gazes in mirrors, deflated by what she sees.35 She hopes a

fresh, unlined face will make her respectable, but this scheme also fails, for brightly-lit streets

and restaurants, her usual haunts, exhibit her aging face.

Treading Water

Julia’s lifestyle frightens family and strangers alike, who puzzle over how to displace and

place her at the same time. “Her career of ups and downs had rubbed most of the hall-marks off

her, so that it was not easy to guess at her age, her nationality, or the social background to which

she properly belonged” (M 240). She is an Everywoman without the sense of belonging the term

35 Angela Hewett explains the cosmetic industry’s effect upon women, citing Kathy Peiss’s article, “Making Faces.” Peiss “suggests that women’s experimentation with makeup and general acceptance of a more fluid conception of the self may have promised something utopian: boundaries between ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ women could be troubled in public play with cosmetics.” Angela Hewett, “The ‘Great Company of Real Women’: Modernist Writers and Mass Commercial Culture,” Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Lisa Rado (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994) 355. 96 implies. Rather than blend into her surroundings, she becomes lost and alone, excluded from conventional society, unable to forge a whole from its disorienting parts. “Every day is a new day; every day you are a new person. What have you to do with the day before?” she asks herself (M 325). Her visit to London starts to blur even before it ends. “It had become a disconnected episode to be placed with all the other disconnected episodes which made up her life” (M 325). Her inability to assimilate the past with the present prevents her from attaining a coherent personal narrative.

Julia strives to avoid the stultifying routines of traditional women’s lives, her choices further reflecting Rhys’s innovative female discourse. Her novels “enact through style [. . .] this existential search for an original way of writing, living, and being. This way involves getting outside categorisation, stereotypes, and convention” (Wheeler 102) to highlight the artificiality of social conventions such as marriage. Yet Marya drifts into marriage and Julia actively seeks it, both of them drawn to men they perceive as mysterious, similar to them. More self-assured women might recognize such men for the untrustworthy underworld figures that they are. Yet for Rhys’s women, “the deadening of life occurs because of repetition, of sameness, of familiarity, of routine, or habit” (Wheeler 109), all of which leads to their attraction for unfamiliar people and places.

If marriage is destructive for women, remaining single is just another unappealing option.

It is hard to say who suffers more, Julia or her sister Norah, who leads the life expected of— therefore forced upon—unmarried women. Although younger than Julia, Norah is even more ragged after spending her young womanhood caring for their ailing, widowed mother on strained finances. Their deceased father is yet another absent male leaving women to struggle on their own. As the sisters meet in London after a ten-year separation, the bedraggled Norah critically 97

eyes Julia, who is clad in beautiful clothes. Trying to wield the moral upper hand, she is jealous

of Julia in light of her own wasted years. She is the good daughter for sacrificing her desires

while her sister and male relatives live for themselves. She “represents the woman who played it

straight and took no risks, who accepted her lower-middle-class life in all its drabness; she is

among life’s defeated women” (O’Connor 80).36 When their mother dies, she asserts her newfound authority by banishing Julia from the flat—a flat she nevertheless is in danger of losing, for her finances now are even grimmer. Not only do the “effects of economic and societal oppression make it impossible for any woman to develop into an autonomous individual” (Brown 8), but they also engender women’s hostility toward one another. Mackenzie

contains no female friendships or support systems.

It is tempting to see the women of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie as heroic in their will to

live despite their deplorable lives. Their survival, however, only deepens their despair. Norah

becomes embittered while caring for her mother, whose death compounds her fear of poverty.

Her mother’s nurse, Ms. Wyatt, lords her self-sufficiency over less fortunate women. Norah

believes her sister has escaped domestic drudgery, when in fact for Julia, “the dependency of a

kept woman replaces the dependency of a wife” (Hochstadt 3). Her lifestyle is less a challenge

to the status quo than an alarming incompetence at handling fundamental daily tasks. She does

not so much resist the “dehumanised, middle-class, stereotyped housewife, mother, or even working-women roles pressed upon women” (Wheeler 117-18) as prove utterly incapable of them. To state that Rhys’s female characters “are no longer wife and mother” (Druxes 51) is problematic since they never play such parts to begin with. Their marriages quickly fail;

36 Nancy Hemond Brown believes Norah “found a dull but workable way of establishing herself in life without depending on men,” yet I believe her life is ultimately as soul-destroying as Julia’s. Nancy Hemond Brown, “On Becoming a Butterfly: Issues of Identity in Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie,” Jean Rhys Review, 2:1 (1987) 11. 98

motherhood only lasts a few weeks. Ultimately, Julia “is more alienated [than Norah], her

family barely tolerating her presence [. . .] Psychically, she has reached a state of torpor and self-

doubt more draining than the bewilderment of the besieged Marya” (Hochstadt 3-4). Rhys

resists canonical modernism’s reconfiguring of the self by depicting women characters with no self to begin with. Her heroines struggle not to make sense of society but to numb themselves to its barrage of laughter and insult.

Silenced and marginalized, Julia nevertheless expresses herself vocally at key moments.

After their mother’s funeral, she shouts at Norah, “ ‘People are such beasts, such mean beasts

[. . .] And do you think I’m going to cringe to a lot of mean, stupid animals? If all good,

respectable people had one face, I’d spit in it. I wish they all had one face so that I could spit in

it’” (M 311). She includes Norah in all “‘the people who’ve knuckled under’ ” (M 312) and calls

Uncle Griffiths an “ ‘abominable old man’ ” (M 312). Nevertheless, Rhys demonstrates how

English society thwarts women, flourishing feminist and suffragette movements notwithstanding.

The “spirit of revolt and hedonism [after World War I] did not last beyond the twenties,” writes

Cate Haste, as women were discouraged from seeking outside employment and again relegated to the home (62-3). Julia has no home, however. With no husband and a dead baby in her past, she nurtures only her own anxieties. She avoids her sister’s fate but feels “predestined,” circulating London while “the clock which struck each quarter in that aggressive and melancholy way was the same clock that she used to hear” (M 271). The tolling of Big Ben in Mrs.

Dalloway leads characters to epiphanic moments of self-realization. For Rhys’s women, repetitive sounds are enervating, emphasizing the daily strain of survival and sapping them of the energy that might otherwise go toward constructing an identity. 99

James Joyce shares Rhys’s recognition of conventional society’s paralyzing effects. In his short story “Eveline,” he depicts a young woman trapped in a desolate household by an abusive father, a promise to a dying mother, and a provincial Catholic village determined to suffocate its women. Considering her opportunity to elope and leave the country, Eveline weighs the “shelter and food” at home against “the danger of her father’s violence” if she stays home with “nobody to protect her” (Dubliners 37-8). She envisions the respect she would enjoy as a married woman away from Ireland. When the moment arises to flee with a man who

“would give her life, perhaps love, too” (Dubliners 40), Eveline collapses under the pressure of having to decide and returns home, defeated, to her father and siblings.

Eveline parallels Norah’s capitulation to society, yet had she gone away, she likely would have encountered the peripatetic life of the Zellis and the isolation of Julia. For Rhys, identity— particularly female identity—cannot be shaped within a repressive society. Yet while Joyce describes Dubliners as “the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country” (qtd. in

Deane 41), Rhys’s characters leave their country behind and are never permitted to return. In

Joyce, it is crucial “that a character should take possession of the language of others, the public language, and render it as his inimitable own” (Deane 43). Confronting a hegemonic discourse that defines her demeaningly, Julia, conversely, is “a puzzling, riddling, self-questioning loose cannon who continually destabilises conventional values for women, sexuality and male behaviour towards women” (Savory 83). “Eveline” posits marriage as an escape for women.

For women in patriarchy, however, marriage leads to an even more fragmented self-identity, manifest in the appalling experiences of Sasha Jansen in Rhys’s fourth novel.

Good Morning, Midnight 100

Good Morning, Midnight (1939) opens in Paris in 1937, where Sasha has come for a two-week reprieve from her desolate life in London. She pays for her rooms with a small monthly income, the legacy of a deceased aunt. “Two-pound-ten every Tuesday and a room off the Gray’s Inn Road” (Good Morning, Midnight 369) provides Sasha not the serenity of Virginia

Woolf’s room of her own, however, but an isolated space in which to drink herself to death.

“Unlike the mark on the wall which provided Virginia Woolf with so many analogues, the spots on the walls in Rhys’s novels are roaches, and they do not go away” (Ashcom 18). The Rhys woman’s room becomes a coffin, sealing her off from the world yet unable to halt her demoralization. Woolf and Rhys’s contrasting visions of women’s rooms stem from their divergent sense of what it means to be a writer. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf picks up her pencil to indicate wherein a woman’s freedom lies. In Smile, Please: An Unfinished

Autobiography, Rhys likens writing fiction to being possessed, taken up by her pen in icy, mouse-infested lodgings.

Despite their differences, the two writers demand a liberating space for all women. “No privacy, No cash” (Angier 476), Rhys writes, in a letter detailing the numerous factors conspiring to prevent her from writing, thus acknowledging the importance of money and solitude to women’s creativity. In numerous letters, Rhys reiterates her frustration at being denied a “place, room, cave, cabin to write in. I cannot see how I can manage without that—Or how anybody can,” she says. “Our flatlet [. . .] has some advantages but there is no vestige of space outside or in and not much privacy” (Letters 102).37 Rather than make demands from the start, Woolf’s rhetoric in A Room of One’s Own builds slowly toward her thesis that women must have access to the same resources that fund education as men. Rhys also understands that declaring her

37 Rhys reiterates her desperate need for space and privacy throughout her letters. See Letters pp. 98-9 (1/27/53), 108 (6/8/53), 125 (1/25/56), 180 (1/7/60), 184 (4/6/60), and 199 (1/3/61). 101

needs bluntly is likely to elicit disdain, that women are considered selfish, or not considered at

all, when daring to voice their needs. She therefore self-deprecatingly refers to herself as “one of

those no goods who need a room of my own (warm)” (Letters 108).

As crucial to women as a safe, private space is psychological and emotional balance,

neither of which Sasha finds. With or without a legacy, “All rooms are the same” to her. “All

rooms have four walls, a door, a window or two, a bed, a chair and perhaps a bidet. A room is a

place where you hide from the wolves outside and that’s all any room is” (GMM 366). Money

from a friend prompts her departure from London in search of a better room elsewhere. She

fares as badly in Paris, however, where she haunts cafés whose patrons are potential enemies and

whose ubiquitous mirrors serve as cruel reminders of her age. Viewing each day as a relentless

cycle of empty hours, Sasha “transforms freedom into the terror of a loss of control or an

unforeseen incursion from the outside. The plan is a defence and it is all there is,” Rachel

Bowlby explains (41), as Rhys reveals the menacing side to women’s freedom, further inverting

existential literary convention. Of the character Audry in Sartre’s Depaysement, van Stralen

writes, “His being detached is reinforced by the fact that nobody in Naples pays any attention to

him. Thence perhaps his tendency to kill time” (225). In Good Morning, Midnight—in fact in

each of Rhys’s novels—detached women never feel safe from scrutiny. Like Septimus Smith in

Mrs. Dalloway, they are convinced that everyone around them stares, judges, and smirks.

In addition, Sasha’s legacy provides her relatives with an excuse to reject her, rather than respect or at least tolerate her for being no longer financially burdensome. Recalling a trip to

London after a five-year absence, Sasha remembers her family’s unconcealed disgust. “ ‘We consider you as dead,’” they said. “ ‘Why didn’t you make a hole in the water? Why didn’t you drown yourself in the Seine?’” (GMM 368). If the bourgeoisie had its way, unconventional 102

women would sink to the bottom of a river. Rather than concede defeat, Sasha sees through to

her family’s “extraordinary naïveté. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliché. [. . .]

And they believe in the clichés—there’s no hope” (GMM 368-9). Rhys’s narrative exposes the

clichés sustaining traditional lives. Dispensing with convention requires more than talking in

mixed company about toilets and sex.38 For Rhys, creating a viable space for women entails a

total overhaul of patriarchal mores. Sasha’s experience reveals the futility of pretending they do

not exist.

No Money-Nix

Like Julia Martin, Sasha has a short-lived marriage in her past. Unlike Julia, she does not

discuss her husband or defend him to others, but recalls their relationship privately. As a bored

and lonely young woman, she entrusts herself to a man unequipped to relieve her apathy and grief. Her fragile identity soon crumbles with the paternalistic Enno, a “feckless husband whose

lack of worldly success has made him all the more lordly in his assumptions about women’s

place” (Hochstadt 5). Her hatred of her musty rooms in London, Sasha recalls, prompted her

elopement. Once married, she finds herself living a lie that distresses her and her husband’s

tenuous bond. “He seemed very prosperous when I met him in London” (GMM 413), she

remembers—the main reason she marries him—“but now no money—nix” (GMM 413). Like

Stephan Zelli, Enno acquires money on the sly in various European cities. He forbids Sasha to

go out alone or even speak, telling her to shut up and refusing to answer her questions.

38 Virginia Woolf viewed repressed speech as indicative of England’s patriarchal oppression. In a diary entry of January 3, 1915, she writes, “It is strange how old traditions, so long buried as one thinks, suddenly crop up again. [. . .] If the British spoke openly about W.C.’s & copulation, then they might be stirred by universal emotions. As it is, an appeal to feel together is hopelessly muddled by intervening greatcoats & fur coats.” Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume I: 1915-1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977) 5. 103

Several women novelists of the 1930s explore how women might thrive personally and

professionally while married.39 Jean Rhys’s heroines, conversely, cannot imagine themselves

empowered either at home or in public. Intent on denying their reality, Marya and Julia remember or invent only pleasurable moments from their marriages. Sasha torments herself by recalling her marital disgraces, such as the day Enno mocked her lovemaking and stormed from their room, leaving her for three days, pregnant and hungry. “Sasha’s plight highlights the root of oppressive patriarchal relationships in which the woman is also dependent upon the man for her material and physical well-being” (Le Gallez 126). Bearing money and wine on his return, but no explanation for his absence, Enno orders Sasha to peel an orange and feed him, dominating her by enforcing demeaning gender roles. “Now is the time to say, ‘Peel it yourself’,” Sasha thinks; “now is the time to say ‘Go to hell’, now is the time to say ‘I won’t be treated like this’. But much too strong—the room, the street, the thing in myself, oh, much too strong…I peel the orange, put it on a plate and give it to him” (GMM 423). As Marya senses and suppresses an essence, the “thing in herself,” Sasha rejects it before it takes root. Remaining subordinate to Enno is less painful than self-realization.

One occasion forces Enno to play the subordinate, as Sasha sets out for money one

desperate day and returns with one hundred francs. She tells Enno she got the money from a

woman she once knew. In fact she begs it from a former lover, suffering a sneer and sloppy kiss

from him in the exchange. Enno takes the francs regardless of his suspicions, continuing a

pattern degrading to both of them, but particularly to Sasha, who is everywhere reminded of

39 See Diana Wallace, “Revising the Marriage Plot in Women’s Fiction of the 1930s,” Women Writers of the 1930s Gender, Politics, History, ed. Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). Wallace includes Vera Brittain, Rebecca West, Naomi Mitchison, F. Tennyson Jesse, E.H. Young, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margaret Kennedy, and Storm Jameson among women novelists who “use the marriage plot specifically to explore how marriage might be refashioned to accommodate women’s increasing expectations in sexual, political, and professional life” (63). 104

women who share her fate. Like Marya, Sasha reads to fill her empty hours. Seeking a “long, calm book about people with large incomes,” she encounters a book vendor who “insists upon

selling me lurid stories of the white-slave traffic” (GMM 425) instead. Twenty-five years after the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1912, remnants of England’s white slavery panic reside in a dusty bookstall, emerging to warn women of the dangers of foreign men. As in Voyage in the

Dark, Rhys derides such legends, depicting women’s sexual and marital captivity in Europe.

Several instances in Good Morning, Midnight counter Anglo-European stereotypes of the

Other, most poignantly in the tale told by Sasha’s Russian acquaintance, Serge. He describes a day in London when he investigated a noise in the outer hallway of his flat. Peering out, he says, he sees a drunken woman lying and crying on the floor. She tells him she is from Martinique, the mistress of the man in the flat above, who has not allowed her outside except at night for more than two years. She tells Serge of the other residents’ contempt for her because she is not white, that the man she lives with disregards her sorrow and keeps her because she can cook.

When Serge finds her, she has just drunk a bottle of whiskey, devastated by a little girl in the building who said “she was a dirty woman, that she smelt bad, and that she hadn’t any right in the house” (GMM 404). Serge finds it remarkable that a young child should know “so exactly how to be cruel and who it was safe to be cruel to” (GMM 404), attributing her behavior to human nature, some kind of sixth sense. More likely, she, a white English child, has been carefully schooled in color and gender bias. A quick study, she understands that women, especially foreign women with accents, are suitable targets for insults even from children.

Rather than an Anglo girl absconded to the tropics, Rhys portrays a Martiniquaise trapped in a sham marriage in England, simultaneously sealed off from society and available for its contempt. 105

Legal marriage proves just as dreadful to women. Not content to demean Sasha on his

own, Enno conspires with another woman to do so, returning to the flat with his “friend” Paulette

one evening with a steak for the pregnant Sasha. After Sasha finishes eating, Paulette smirks and

tells her it was horse, gleefully anticipating her revulsion. When she does not react, “their

mouths, that were wide open to laugh, went small again” (GMM 427). Sasha’s lethargy is no calculated rebuttal to Enno and Paulette, but a sign of the listlessness to which an unhappy,

insecure marriage has reduced her. Her one consolation is her pregnancy, for while she is ill and

afraid during the first few months, she later feels joy at the thought of having a baby, making

hers the only pregnancy in Rhys’s fiction devoid of anguish.

Enno is nowhere to be found when Sasha goes into labor, portending the demise of both

marriage and child in a pitiable sequence of events. Arriving alone at the hospital, she learns her

bed is not ready, and returns to her flat, climbs the stairs to her room, and waits another few

hours. During labor, her pleas for chloroform are denied. “There is no doctor to give chloroform

here. This is a place for poor people. Besides, [the doctor] doesn’t approve of chloroform”

(GMM 379), she remembers. In an aggressive, male-dominated professional world, female doctors harbor no allegiance to female patients. According to Rhys, they fail to do so for quite some time. Writing of her hospital stay in 1949 in Holloway Prison, she calls her female doctor a “villain” who “always broke promises, which a doctor ought not to do [. . .]. I did think about

the Suffragettes. Result of all their sacrifices? The woman doctor!!! Really human effort is

futile” (Letters 55-6). Sasha’s experience illustrates the need to reconfigure professionalism, so

that it is concerned with, not opposed to, responding to poor women’s pain.

Sasha obsesses over her poverty after her baby is born, grieving for the stigma her son

will bear for coming from a family with no money. When the baby dies several weeks later, she 106

gazes at him “lying with a ticket tied round his wrist because he died in a hospital. And there I

am looking down at him, without one line, without one wrinkle, without one crease” (GMM

381), thanks to the nurse who swathed her in tight bandages so that after a week, after she is

unwrapped, there is no trace that she even gave birth. Waging a losing battle against the

wrinkles in her face, she would welcome the stretch marks of childbirth to remind her of an

actual, visceral experience. Motherhood becomes like everything else in her life, however—

dead and gone, unconnected to any other event. Poor women face pregnancies and mothering

terrified and alone, their husbands absent or estranged. Anna Morgan is nearly, or probably,

killed from an abortion. Julia’s baby dies. Sasha is so malnourished she yields no breast milk

the few days her son is alive. The husbands vanish. Nothing healthy or enduring comes from

marriages built on nothingness.

Resuming her life of loneliness, drinking, and wandering the streets (an apt description of

her married life, too), Sasha manifests the danger of “being there” rather than “existing.”

“ ‘Existing’ refers to an active involvement in the situation motivated by moral sense,” writes

Hans van Stralen. “ ‘Being there,’ on the other hand, is the uncolored indication of the fact that man is a phenomenon in the universe. [. . .] Refusal to depart from this anonymous way of life is considered to be bad faith within Existentialism” (227). Sasha does not refuse departure, which implies self-assertion and motivation. Unlike Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea, whose freedom comes from perceiving that the world exists and that it makes no difference, Sasha remains anonymous because the phases of her life collapse in upon themselves. She dwells amid painful images of a marriage that may as well have never existed.

Always Midnight 107

Years later, men still approach Sasha for sex. Young and old, shabby and dapper, of

various nationalities, men on the streets of Montparnasse take it for granted that Sasha can be bought. “Oh Lord, is that what I look like?” she thinks, with her fur coat and stylish new hat, alone on the streets, unoccupied and unemployed.40 Had she even wished to get a job, by 1937 it

would have been nearly impossible, as women no longer enjoyed the opportunities prevalent

during and after the First World War. What few jobs there were “complied with the social

expectation that women are charming, beautiful creatures obsessed with appearance. [. . .]. Such

frustrating and tedious work failed to give [them] any sense of identity or satisfactions” (Savory

135). Two decades after the war, “Marriage was [again] portrayed as a career for women,

housewifery was elevated to a craft,” and “employment prospects diminished” (Bland 89).

Conservatism increased and old mores were resurrected to demean unmarried women.41

Prejudice toward Sasha further exhibits the arbitrary distinctions drawn between women

and men. The term “man in the street,” Rachel Bowlby explains, connotes regularity and

solidity, an average, unthreatening person. A “woman in/of the street,” however, denotes

iniquity and prostitution, reflecting yet another hypocrisy of artificial gender divisions.42 Once again, Rhys seeks to redefine terms to liberate unconventional women. In an equitable society,

“walking the street” would signify an “automatic transgressiveness that is also the chance of

[. . .] going somewhere different” (Bowlby viii). In Rhys’s fiction, however, reflective of

society’s imbalances, “there is a melancholic stasis to the possibilities which the narrator

imagines for herself, which appears to prevent her from moving at all” (Bowlby viii). Sasha’s

40 Sasha’s treatment resonates with the Woolfs’ experience one night upon encountering a woman who could have stepped out of any Rhys story. Quentin Bell explains, in language denigrating to women, “Returning from [Vanessa’s New Year’s party] [. . .], the Woolfs witnessed a social injustice of the kind that made Leonard’s blood boil. Two men passing on the other side of the road jeered at a rather tipsy middle-aged tart. She retorted fiercely, shrieking out”; moments later, Leonard pleaded her case with the officer arrived on the scene (Bell Volume II, 150). 41 Bland 65, 88. 108

wandering stems from fear and restlessness, ultimately leading nowhere. Wendy Brandmark

believes the Rhys heroine is a privileged witness to the “tremendous variety of life” and “the delight of these streets, marketplaces, these lovely, lowly women” (27-8). She incurs only psychological and physical distress from her outings, however. With cities divided into acceptable and objectionable quadrants, women like Sasha find no place to establish their selfhood.

Situating her heroines in such environs, Rhys complicates male-oriented assessments of

European modern society. As Shari Benstock explains, early twentieth-century Paris teemed

with expatriates who found the city congenial to their artistic and literary endeavors. The city

offered “privacy, solitude, time for reflection, and a place set apart for such a special activity”

(77-8). Yet the ideal eludes both Rhys and her heroines. Paris may hold a few pleasant

memories for Marya, Julia, and Sasha, or provide temporary asylum from familial discord in

England, but fails to provide a lasting sense of friendship or community. “The ‘Paris’ all these

people write about, Henry Miller, even Hemingway etc [sic] was not ‘Paris at all—it was

‘America in Paris’ or ‘England in Paris,’ ” Rhys writes. “The real Paris had nothing to do with

that lot” (Letters 280). In Jean Rhys’s life and work, European cities reassert patriarchal and

colonial codes by preying on the powerless.

Alone in Paris in the early 1920s, her first husband in prison, Rhys underwent much of

the trauma experienced by her fictional women, beginning with her submission to an affair and

financial support from a moneyed, ostensibly married man. Young and poor, seeking a publisher

for her husband’s work, Rhys succumbed to her first patron, Ford Madox Ford, who took her in

42 Rachel Bowlby, Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing, and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) viii. 109

as his lover and changed her name while mentoring her as a writer.43 Experiencing “erotic and

emotional relationships outside the bounds of marriage,” Rhys garnered no respect or even

tolerance, but “opened herself to further exploitation by men and, often, the censure of other

women” (Benstock 452), in this case Ford’s live-in mistress, Stella Bowen. Rhys quickly

realized that the artistic and sexual freedoms of interwar Europe existed in name only.

Sasha is also aware of the system and deplores it. If women are invited into mainstream

society only after adapting its vicious tactics, she prefers to remain outside. Visiting a salon, she

draws an analogy between dying her hair platinum blonde and society’s indoctrination of people

into cruelty. “First [the hair] must be bleached, that is to say, its own colour must be taken out of

it—and then it must be dyed, that is to say, another colour must be imposed on it. (Educated

hair…And then, what?)” (GMM 375). To Sasha, integration into society entails painstakingly,

painfully extracting individuality and replacing it with unnatural elements. Nevertheless she

concedes her own participation in the process, namely her marriage to Enno.

Sasha recalls their departure for Brussels after their impersonal marriage ceremony. For

train fare, they sell their clothes for money. “My beautiful life in front of me, opening out like a

fan in my hand,” she thinks (GMM 415), displaying the irony inflecting many of her painful

memories. Like Anna Morgan, Sasha recognizes the absurdity of her life. Her “great form of

resistance, perhaps her most powerful strategy for resisting defeat by the machine,” is “mockery,

satire, and self-irony” (Carr 65); thus Sasha obtains a “form of agency within the dominant

culture” by adapting and decentering stereotypes of women (Kineke 289). Another defense is to

43 For further information on Rhys’s affair with Ford, see Angier’s biography of Rhys as well as Sheila Kineke’s article, “ ‘Like a Hook Fits an Eye’: Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, and the Imperial Operations of Modernist Mentoring,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 16:2 (1997) 281-301. See also Arthur Mizener’s The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford. Literary representations of the affair include Rhys’s Quartet; Rhys’s first husband Jean Lenglet’s Barred (published under the pen name Edouard de Neve); Stella Bowen’s Drawn From Life; and Ford’s When the Wicked Man. 110

articulate her pain and anger, like Julia Martin before her. Constantly told to shut up, Sasha

speaks out. If too tired or demoralized, she offers her oppressors silent invective instead. “One

day, quite suddenly, when you’re not expecting it,” she thinks, “I’ll take a hammer from the folds

of my dark cloak and crack your skull like an egg-shell. Crack it will go, the eggshell; out they

will stream, the blood, the brains. One day, one day, . . . One day the fierce wolf that walks by

my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out” (GMM 375). Yet while Rhys’s

women “exert will, even at the cost of self-destruction” at times, and are “thus not merely as

victims who are acted upon” (Freeman 6), their ultimate retreat into memory, delirium, or self-

abasement hastens their demise, exemplified in the conclusion of Good Morning, Midnight.

A Living Death

Sasha Jansen continues both to long for a man’s affection and ensure that she never finds

it. Her best opportunity comes from an unlikely source, a young gigolo who zeroes in on her initially because she appears to have money. The two gradually warm toward each other, yet ultimately Sasha drives him away. Pinned beneath him in the novel’s final scene, she vacillates

between desire and fear until offering him money if he will leave her alone. Although she cares for him, she targets him for vengeance in retaliation for a lifetime of insults from men. Duly

insulted, he leaves, leaving her naked in bed alone. As she takes into her bed the traveling

salesman, the commis from the room next door, her self-fulfilling prophecy is complete. “He

doesn’t say anything,” Sasha says. “I look straight into his eyes and despise another poor devil of a human being for the last time. [. . .] Then I put my arms round him and pull him down on to the bed, saying: ‘Yes— yes—yes…’” (GMM 462). Sasha rejects the gigolo for a man who disgusts her and terrorizes her with his insults and leering. 111

Critics are divided regarding the novel’s conclusion. Many believe that by embracing the

commis, Sasha finally allows herself an expression of love toward another of society’s misfits.

Her voice declares “the power of the last word,” says Judith Kegan Gardiner, and challenges a

“capitalist patriarchy” disdainful of women’s speech (“Good Morning” 249). Perhaps the

“hideousness she embraces is less important than her willingness to embrace,” writes Pearl

Hochstadt, and so the novel becomes a “gallant salute to the coming of darkness which nonetheless refuses to deny the joys of daylight” (5-6). 44 Yet Sasha’s final speech is interior,

devoid of the self-revelation of Clarissa Dalloway, and daylight is certainly no friend to women,

revealing as it does the wrinkles, caked face powder, and growing-out dyed hair each heroine

tries to hide. The novel’s title confirms that troubled, outcast women are never safe, suffering

indignities day and night. There is no affirmation in Sasha’s “yes,” despite echoes of Molly

Bloom, only resignation to despair.45 Accepting the commis is not a choice, but “demonstrates

the fictionality of the notion of choice [. . .]. To endorse such a view of individual choice is both

to deny the extent to which the self is socially shaped and constrained and to ignore the extent of

the misogyny Rhys so meticulously depicts” (Freeman 101).

Neither is Sasha’s embrace of the commis an epiphany akin to those of high modernist

texts. It is an encounter with death, manifest in the commis’s pale shroud and Sasha’s stiff limbs

as she lies there “as if I were dead” (GMM 461). Although she claims to enact her desperation

“for the last time” (GMM 462), hers is in fact a living death, doomed to be repeated, rather than

the final, liberating death of Septimus Smith or Antoinette Cosway. Rhys does not condemn

Sasha or “collude with conventional society’s judgement of women’s sexual behaviour” (Horner

44 Veronica Gregg (“Historical Imagination”), Helen Carr, Pearl Hochstadt, and Judith Kegan Gardiner (“Goodnight, Modernism”) are among critics who view Sasha’s action as self-affirming, an acceptance of and connection with another human being, no matter how wretched. 112

and Zlosnik 145). Rather she demonstrates that alienated women cannot be saved “by marriage,

escape from London, or motherhood” (Thomas, Worlding 123), none of which allows them to

forge an identity in a hostile world. In the fictional world of Jean Rhys, modern female identity

cannot be realized until conventional society overcomes its fear and ignorance of alienated women.

45 Conversely, Stanford Sternlicht, Barbara Claire Freeman, and Bianca Tarozzi consider Sasha’s embrace of the commis to be her ultimate defeat. 113

Chapter Three: Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and the Multiplicity of Modern Identity

Women in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing contend with additional pressures. Experiencing psychological dislocations amid society’s conflicting ideologies of African-American womanhood, they must project an identity outward to thwart a barrage of externally-derived, racist signifiers. Characters in Mrs. Dalloway critique each other’s homes, clothing, and professions, but only briefly, more concerned with understanding the mindset of the person involved. While Clarissa often feels self-conscious, she never attempts to become someone she is not. The heroines in Rhys’s four early novels feel the sting of gossip and are obsessed with their appearance; certainly their psychological and physical trauma go hand in hand, yet it is because they are deserted, not because others latch on to them and refuse to let go. In Plum Bun, Quicksand, and Passing, women of color cannot escape the obsessive scrutiny of others, who foist myriad qualifications upon them to rob them of their autonomy. The women adopt masks in defense,1 simultaneously denying and accepting such impositions.2 For African-American women, achieving selfhood entails arranging fragments on the outside into a viable narrative inside, adding a new dimension to the introspection of Clarissa

1 In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Houston A. Baker, Jr., defines the mask of African-American modernism differently, not as a means of passing as white, but as for instance the stereotypical minstrel act sanctioned by late nineteenth-century white society. He cites Charles Chesnutt as one who mastered this form of masking to enact change and enfranchisement subversively. For women writers of color, the mask changes and multiplies, yet still “ensures cognitive exploration and affective transformation leading to the growth and survival of a nation” (37). Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 2 In his article on the passing novel, John Sheehy cites complications relevant to my discussion of Fauset and Larsen. (Helga Crane in Quicksand never tries to pass for white, but engages in other forms of masking in her quest for selfhood.) Sheehy writes, the “identity of a Negro who is ‘passing’ necessitates not only that he must live the color-line with everyone else, but also that he must articulate it with every gesture, every utterance, every thought. Being the physical embodiment of the color-line complicates further his quest for a workable identity: Incapable of convincing himself that he is white, unwilling to accept what follows from being black, he is seemingly relegated— or, rather, unwittingly relegates himself, in complicity with a racist social dialogue that sanctions the relegation—to the zero-space between the poles of his and his society’s constructions of race” (406). John Sheehy, “The Mirror 114

Dalloway and the narrow psychic space of Rhys’s women. Marriage in the three novels

exemplifies the racially enforced multiplicity of identity for women of color.

Jessie Redmon Fauset

In Plum Bun husbands provide for their wives, “poverty” means dining in rather than out, and viable employment is generally available. Like Virginia Woolf, however, Fauset perceives how the trappings of bourgeois life become conflated with personal fulfillment. The link between the two is no accident, but the patriarchy’s method of subordinating women. In addition, Fauset highlights the interconnections between money, marriage, and the denigration of

people of color. Her writing may not reflect the “experiments with vernacular forms such as

spirituals, blues, and jazz [. . .] now regarded as the building blocks of African-American

modernism” (Wall, Women 56-7), yet within its story lines of marriage and marriage deferred lie

challenges to society’s arbitrary strictures. Criticized for conventionality at a time when African-

American writers were encouraged to transcend the status quo,3 Fauset’s novel reworks

traditional women’s roles to explore black female consciousness in American society.

Fauset’s literary world has been dismissed as imaginary and romantic, yet portrays the

experiences of economically advantaged African Americans nevertheless restricted from

developing their skills and pursuing their dreams.4 Plum Bun’s “convention of the novel of

manners can be seen as protective mimicry, a kind of deflecting mask for [Fauset’s] more

and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity,” African American Review, 33.3 (1999): 401-415. 3 “To be sure, she was traditional to some extent,” writes Deborah E. McDowell, “both in form and content, but [. . .] introduced several subjects into her novels that were hardly typical drawing room conversation topics in the mid 1920s. Promiscuity, exploitative sexual affairs, miscegenation, even incest appear in her novels. In fact prim and proper Jessie Fauset included a far greater range of sexual activity than did most of Du Bois’s debauched tenth.” Deborah E. McDowell, “The Neglected Dimension of Jessie Redmon Fauset,” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 87. 115

challenging concerns” (McDowell, “Neglected” 87). Born in 1882 in Camden County, New

Jersey, Fauset attended the prestigious Philadelphia High School for Girls, graduated Phi Beta

Kappa from Cornell University in 1905, and received a Master’s degree in French literature from

the University of Pennsylvania in 1919.5 In between, she studied at the Sorbonne, established

herself in Harlem, and from 1919-1926 served as literary editor for the NAACP’s journal, The

Crisis. Fauset’s accomplishments reflect her determination and talent in overcoming obstacles

faced by African Americans and women. Her biographer, Carolyn Sylvander, notes that Fauset’s

“career was a breaking of many occupational barriers to women and a shattering of the image of

what a Black woman’s role should be, whether that image was manufactured by white or Black society” (83). Yet while the academic credentials of black men were touted as models for the race, Fauset’s denoted, for some critics, her willful self-removal from the so-called masses.6 In

fact, she concurred with W.E.B. Du Bois that African-American accomplishments in education

and the arts would foster greater racial tolerance in America.

The multifaceted nature of Fauset’s career reflects her rigorous scholarship and race- consciousness. As Sylvander writes, “the events and achievements of Fauset’s life are amazingly representative of changes taking place in that portion of the United States—Black

America—that feels and reflects changes of the larger culture in a kind of distilled, intensified fashion” (2-3). As literary editor of The Crisis, Fauset not only selected pieces for publication and corresponded with contributors, but also contributed poems, stories, and editorials of her own. She reviewed books of fiction, drama, poetry, journalism, folklore, biography, criticism,

4 Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux 1981) 197. 5 Biographical information on Fauset is from Carolyn Wedlin Sylvander, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer (Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1981). 6 Hiroko Sato, for one, cites Fauset’s upbringing and education derogatorily and believes “her interest lies only on the social level” (278). Hiroko Sato, “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen,” The Harlem Renaissance 1920-1940: Remembering the Harlem Renaissance, Ed. Cary D. Wintz (New York; London: Garland Publishing Company, 1996) 261-287. 116

and literary history in both English and French. She wrote articles on Egyptian nationalism,

Brazilian emancipation, Haitian literature, and European anti-Semitism. She wrote of her stay in

Paris at the onset of World War I in 1914, and attended and reported on the Second Pan-African

Congress held in Europe in 1921.7

Another notable accomplishment is her work on The Brownies’ Book, the nation’s first magazine for African-American children and young adults. While other children’s magazines and schoolbooks perpetuated grotesque stereotypes of black Americans and the “dark continent,”

The Brownies’ Book highlighted the honor, integrity, and beauty of African and African-

American life. The first issue carried a photograph of African-American children in the South protesting violence against blacks. The June 1920 issue ran an article called “A Little Talk

About West Africa,” accompanied by a full-page picture of West African children posing in front of their school. Summer issues published the names, pictures, accomplishments, and future plans of graduates from African-American men and women’s high schools.8 Such work refutes

poet Claude McKay’s dismissal of Fauset and her writing as “prim and dainty as a primrose

[. . .], fastidious and precious” (112-13).

In particular, Fauset contended with American and Harlem Renaissance misogyny. “Had

she not been a ‘colored woman’ she might have sought work with a New York publishing house

[. . .] There is no telling what she would have done had she been a man, given her first-rate mind

and formidable efficiency at any task” (Levering Lewis 121).9 Instead she had the dubious honor of being named one of The Crisis’ “Men of the Month” in 1919 and of seeing credit for the

7 See Section IV in Sylvander, “Jessie Fauset, Journalist: The Crisis and the [sic] Brownies’ Book.” 8 For further information on The Brownies’ Book, see Dianne Johnson-Feelings, ed., The Best of The Brownies’ Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Sylvander’s biography; and Cheryl Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). 9 Cheryl Wall concurs, stating, “Even with her degrees from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, she had no other options [than high school teaching]” (Women 35). 117

magazine’s success attributed to its founder and editor, Du Bois. As literary editor, however, it

was Fauset who managed the magazine’s daily operations for nearly seven years.10 Nevertheless

she was publicly humiliated at the 1924 Manhattan Civic Club dinner, billed as an event to honor

the publication of her first novel, yet ultimately a forum for up-and-coming male writers. When

it was her publisher’s turn to speak at the podium, he promoted Jean Toomer’s Cane, failing

even to mention Fauset or her novel.11 Plum Bun’s heroine, Angela Murray, similarly knows

that “if she had been a boy and had left home no one would have had a word of blame, it would

have been the proper thing, to be expected and condoned” (Plum Bun 308). As a woman, she is criticized for her problematic choices.

Plum Bun

The world of Plum Bun is a microcosm of the Harlem Renaissance itself, with city-

dwelling characters debating the means of racial uplift, the purpose of art, and women’s

opportunities within male-dominated milieus. While Anglo women of the time contended with

sexist Victorian ideals, black women in America suffered the added burden of racism, the task of

countering prevailing notions of black womanhood as morally and sexually debauched. Urban

women in particular sought to expand their subjectivity beyond impressions of African-

American life as agrarian, thus backward and illiterate. In Plum Bun, however, Fauset

demonstrates the prejudice enacted toward women, black and (thought to be) white, regardless of

geographical location or social class. With mulatta characters navigating bourgeois worlds,

Fauset also presents an alternative discourse to the black vernacular, a source of contention

among Harlem Renaissance figures. “Heavy use of dialect always bothered Fauset,” writes

10 Sylvander 57, 114. 11 Levering Lewis 69. 118

Sylvander, “perhaps because that characteristic alone was enough to relegate a Black to the

bottom of any heap in her growing-up years for mocking, scornful humor” (109). In her novels

she employs a more conventional linguistic form to express African-American experience.12

Angela Murray leads anything but a conventional life, leaving her home and family

behind to pass as a white person and become an artist in New York City. Yet to read Plum Bun

as simply a novel of passing is “to miss its complex treatment of the intricacies of gender

oppression, as well as the irony and subtlety of its artistic technique” (Plum Bun introduction

xv). Passing in the novel does not capitulate to white standards, but critiques them in Angela

Murray’s journey toward selfhood. The disparities between her public and domestic spheres

fascinate Angela as she learns to pass from her mother, Mattie, neither of whom foresees the

grievous repercussions of her actions. Through Plum Bun’s affairs and marriages, Fauset depicts

the lives of African Americans in fluctuating environments. With thousands migrating from the

South to the North, with social and professional opportunities compromised by class and race

issues, black and white societies clash when Angela decides to pass.

Passing

To “pass” is to mask one identity with another, one that might afford more professional

opportunities or, more significantly, an escape from bodily harm or death. Passing may assume a

12 Whether the black vernacular and rural settings are most appropriate for fictional representations of African- American life remains a point of contention among scholars and critics. For theories and discussions on both sides of the issue, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, & Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970); Hiroko Sato, “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen,” The Harlem Renaissance 1920-40: Remembering the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Cary D. Wintz (New York, London: Garland Publishing Company, Inc., 1996); and Amritjit Singh, The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923-1933 (University Park, London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976). 119

number of forms, traversing in either direction: black ÅÆ white, Jewish ÅÆ Christian, male

ÅÆ female, etc. (Rhys illustrates, on the other hand, that poor immigrant women to England can never pass for respectable British matrons.) In Plum Bun, Angela and her mother pass as

white not by vocally declaring or rejecting their ethnicity but by blending seamlessly into white

society via their light skin and “white” features. Theirs is a stratagem adopted by numerous late

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African Americans.

Historians estimate that as many as 25,000 African Americans passed from the end of

Reconstruction into the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, while as late as 1947, approximately

12,000 blacks continued to do so.13 African Americans who did not pass likely knew those who

did, women and men who “decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee

from the proscription and humiliation which the American color line imposes on them” (Walter

White qtd. in Singh 92).14 Some passed in order to conduct race work in the South, like a female

character from Fauset’s first novel, There Is Confusion (1924). Others passed for fear of being assaulted or lynched, like the protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-

Coloured Man (1912). Still others, such as Mattie Murray in Plum Bun, did so to engage in everyday activities unmolested. Angela decides to pass after growing disgusted with the petty yet oppressive race prejudice directed toward her.

What seems a private decision reverberates throughout her life, which begins in a modest

Philadelphia neighborhood, described in Plum Bun’s opening pages as “narrow, unsparkling, uninviting [. . .] drab,” the houses cramped and boxy, the backyards small and wasted (PB 11).

13 Carole Marks and Diane Edkins, The Power of Pride: Stylemakers and Rulebreakers of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1999) 15. 14 William B. Gatewood cites similar numbers, concurring that of those who did not pass, “others, uncertain about the number, almost always claimed to know of someone who ‘passed’ or at least to know someone whose relative had ‘passed’” (175). William B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). 120

Fauset depicts the passions aroused in children reared in such environs. Angela grows frustrated and restless, while her younger sister Virginia appreciates and finds contentment in traditional home life. For years, they follow an unremarkable routine. Monday through Friday, the parents

work while the daughters attend school, each family member engaged in the rhythms of

domesticity. Weekends are a different matter, however, as light-skinned Mattie and Angela set

out for the city while dark-skinned father Junius and Jinny stay home to explore local

neighborhoods. The Murray household seems placid enough on the surface, yet the family’s

color-specific weekend activities disclose the means by which America’s race obsession disrupts

familial bonds.

Mattie passes to enjoy the material niceties denied black Americans. She “loved pretty

clothes, she liked shops devoted to the service of women,” Fauset writes; “[a] satisfaction that was almost ecstatic seized her when she drank tea in the midst of modishly gowned women in a

stylish tea-room. [. . .] She had no desire to be of these people, but she liked to look in” (PB15-

6). Engaged in such outings, she resembles Rhys’s heroines, mesmerized by the finery that

moneyed society dangles in front of women. Although Mattie recognizes the teas, gowns, and

shops as superficial playthings, her pleasure in them undermines her relationship with her family.

Her husband is unconcerned about her passing, viewing it as simply a game. That Junius sees no

violation of principle in Mattie’s actions indicates the extent of the couple’s naïveté, for as

Fauset’s narrative demonstrates, there is no such thing as harmless passing. Mattie’s weekly

forays into white society unduly influence her daughter Angela, who views them as an emphatic

rejection of African Americanism rather than a means by which prejudice might be subverted. 121

Despite years of occasional passing,15 Mattie does maintain a sense of self, evidenced by

her investment in her community and her honesty with Junius regarding her actions. She

explains to him before they marry that she tells no lie when she passes, merely withholds

information. Historical accounts of passing relay similar explanations. Barrington Guy, a light-

skinned African-American actor, stated in 1939, “ ‘I never tried to pass. Folks thought I was

white and I didn’t enlighten them’” (qtd. in Gatewood 328). A young mulatto man of the time

concurs, sympathizing with “those who had blended into white society. To retain the

‘preferment and distinction’ they possessed as whites, they ‘had simply to keep their lips

sealed’” (Gatewood 174-5).16 Angela, too, never says she is white, and never needs to, as silence is its own disguise. That the disguise works reveals the disconnection between perception and reality in a racist society. Mattie’s and Angela’s uncontested entrance into white establishments exposes “the shakiness of the upper middle class” and the fallacy of determining racial background through physical traits (Christian 44).

Above all, there were “powerful inducements [. . .] for African-American women to pass, even if only on a temporary basis, right up to 1964” (Conde 94). Those who passed were presumed to have justifiable reasons for doing so. “Even some of the most ardent anti-racist campaigners, such as Mary Church Terrell and Lucy Parsons, did not condemn passing” (Conde

94). Nevertheless, Mattie’s passing affects the family dynamic, for she snubs Junius and

Virginia one day when they see her in town and unwittingly threaten her charade. In such moments, the “[f]atal insecurity of the color-struck woman makes the black family a virtual

15 Gatewood explains, “The ‘passing’ phenomenon [. . .] was of two basic varieties: permanent, and occasional or temporary” (175). 16 Sutton Griggs’s The Hindered Hand (1905) presents morally, intellectually, and physically perfect characters to refute racist images of African-Americans. Contemporary writers continue to explore racist misconceptions of black Americans. Toni Morrison's short story “Recitatif” and novel Paradise never say which characters are white and which are black and readers are never sure, either, denoting the impossibility of discerning race through psychological or physical traits. 122

impossibility” (Gilbert & Gubar, No Man’s Land Vol. III 132). Although Mattie is later

ashamed of denying her family, she confirms Angela’s suspicion that it is better to be white than

black no matter the cost—disregarding another occasion when Mattie risks her own safety by acknowledging Junius as her husband. Angela, however, sees color prejudice as insurmountable

if it compels a woman to deny the husband she loves. Following her mother’s example, she will

later ignore Jinny in public and banish her from her life, regarding her as an impediment to her

passing and disparaging her and their father’s dark complexions.

Dazzled by the white city’s posh hotels and upscale stores, Angela disregards her

mother’s motivation, noticing instead that the game of passing is easy and entertaining to play.

More importantly, she perceives that passing hinges less on a person’s skin tone than on flawed

social and racial codes, and that “the issue of who is seeing and who is being seen is far from

simple” (Wall, Women 127). Mattie is pleased when people assume she is white —precisely

why passing is so dangerous to African-American families. Pretending or presumed to be white

means denying being black even when no such statement is voiced aloud. Those who decide to

pass, then, lose the double-consciousness theorized by W.E.B. Du Bois. Although disturbing,

“this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by

the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 5) may engender self-

awareness, the understanding that identity imposed from without is inherently pernicious.17 A.

Yemisi Jimoh defines double-consciousness in African-American literature as “the phenomenon whereby a text simultaneously responds to two conflicting definitions of African American identity: a prevailing and debilitating European American definition as well as a more self- determined African American definition” (176). Angela Murray is certainly self-determined— 123 but to suppress rather than actualize black female identity. Her disjointedness stems from embracing the white world before recognizing what she abandons in doing so.

Angela’s disrupted double-consciousness resonates with Jacques Lacan’s theory of the

Mirror Stage,18 in which a child aged six to eighteen months sees its reflection in a mirror (a literal mirror or its mother’s face) as an accurate representation of itself. This primary identification with the mirror’s reflection is the infant’s first sense of wholeness or completion, yet it is actually a misrecognition, for the face in the mirror is not the child but only a reflection.

One’s sense of self therefore begins in misperception or illusion, necessary to effect a differentiation between self and other. Angela’s misperception runs deep, for as John Sheehy explains, “The paradox at the heart of the mirror stage is that the subjective construction of the I is predicated on an objective and problematic icon: the mirror image” (402). Looking at her mother’s face, Angela sees reflected back at her a black person who would rather be white, not an African-American woman adept at manipulating stereotype. Angela both separates from the

African-American mother and simulates a white woman, a convoluted self/other split that paradoxically fuses two contradictions.

Lacan’s dialectic of recognition, the idea that we know ourselves only insofar as we know others’ responses to us,19 similarly relates to Du Boisian double-consciousness, in which

“people ‘consciously [know] the temptations of both’ sides of their two souls, and they know

‘that both exist’” (Gerald Early qtd. in Jimoh 173). Keenly sensitive to racism yet susceptible to the white world’s temptations, Angela reaches “a debilitating resolution in which externally

17 In The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), James Weldon Johnson’s protagonist states that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “opened my eyes as to who and what I was and what my country considered me; in fact it gave me my bearing” (42). James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York: Knopf, 1970). 18 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” Ecrits: A Selection, ed. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 19 See Madan Sarup’s An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988) for a fuller explanation of Lacanian theories. 124

derived and distorted perceptions of the self constitute a single but alienated self-consciousness”

(Ryan 599). Resolving to sever ties with her family and pass permanently as white, Angela

adapts a single-mindedness that prohibits her from attaining what Judylyn Ryan refers to as

double-vision, “an unchauvinistic comprehension of these contesting visions” (601). Angela

comes closer to experiencing “multiple jeopardy, multiple consciousness” (Wall, Women 73)

amid numerous, simultaneous threats to her identity that lead to its fragmentation.

If separation is necessary for self-recognition to occur, as Lacan claims, then Angela

separates spectacularly—from her family, her home, and her African-American heritage. As

Sheehy explains, “The Lacanian model does not take into account the various ways race

distorts— ‘colors’— the child’s confrontation with the mirror,” for “what [s]he sees—and the

range of possible identities available to be constructed from what s[he] sees—has already largely

been determined for [her]” (403-4).20 Passing as white, Angela invites the alternately freeing and threatening gaze of others, a dynamically charged source of terror and exhilaration in shaping her identity.

Intraracial Color Prejudice

As Floris Barnett Cash explains, “African Americans constructed a class hierarchy based

on color as much as income. Divisiveness in the black community based on skin color began

during slavery and became further entrenched in the decades following freedom” (53). Journalist

George S. Schuyler, from Syracuse, New York, for instance, tells of associating mainly with

white children when he was a child. The “black families in closest proximity to his house were

20 Sheehy discusses the mirror stage in relation to James Weldon Johnson’s novel, cited above. Where Sheehy writes “he,” referring to the novel’s protagonist, I substitute “she,” for Plum Bun’s Angela Murray. John Sheehy, “The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity,” African American Review, 33.3 (1999): 401-415. 125

recent arrivals from the South, and his mother considered them uncouth and devoid of moral and

social standards. Their white neighbors were ‘Yankees’ and as such were what his mother

considered ‘her kind of people’” (Gatewood 113). Wallace Thurman explores intraracial color

prejudice in his novel The Blacker the Berry (1929), in which dark-skinned Emma Lou Morgan

suffers in a family whose motto is “Whiter and whiter every generation” (29). Emma’s coloring offends her mother in particular, who enjoys relative privilege in a mostly-white community and shuns those with skin tones darker than hers. Fauset’s fourth novel, Comedy: American Style

(1933), undertakes the same theme, as Olivia Cary bars her home to people of color and

withholds love from her dark-skinned son, Oliver. Pretending he is her butler when her white

friends come to visit is one of many instances that drive him to suicide.

Yet intraracial color prejudice works two ways, with darker-complexioned African

Americans reviling those with light skin. Josephine Baker, the daughter of a “coal-black”

mother and unknown, presumably white father, stood out in her family because of her “light

brown [. . .] café au lait” skin (Marks and Edkins 23). Her mother’s habit of leaving her in the

care of others for extended periods of time is attributed to her revulsion at her daughter’s light

complexion. “Being rejected by her mother was traumatic for Josephine, as it would be for any

child, and being rejected because she was too light was confusing” (Marks and Edkins 23).

(Ironically, Baker later adapted an elaborate ritual involving baths of goat’s milk, bleach, lemon,

and honey in efforts to lighten her skin.21) Not only the light-skinned but also those thought to

place “a premium on a fair complexion became the targets of bitter criticism by those, usually of

a darker hue, who denounced such color consciousness as a major impediment to the ‘progress of

the race’” (Gatewood 151).

21 Marks and Edkins 23. 126

Of 1940s Harlem society, white writer and editor Nancy Cunard observes, “There are near-white cliques, mulatto groups, dark-skinned sets who will not invite each other to their houses; some would not let a white cross their thresholds…The snobbery around skin color is terrifying” (qtd. in Anderson 336). There is no denying that American society largely privileges light skin over dark, however. In her introduction to the 1996 edition of The Blacker the Berry,

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip writes, “Recent studies have shown that black men with lighter skins have higher incomes, more education, and better chances of being offered employment by white employers” (12). In the 1920s, too, whites considered light-skinned African-Americans more intelligent and trustworthy than those with dark skin, according mulattos greater privileges and more promising job opportunities.22 Angela anticipates such opportunities when she leaves for

New York to pursue a career as an artist, although her father believes a basic, standard education would be best for his daughters. Mattie tells Angela of the conversations she and Junius used to have about their children’s upbringing, she promoting the arts and travel, he favoring more practical, modest aspirations. Their differences reflect a principal conflict among African

Americans at the time.23

22 See Gatewood 153. There exists an alternate African-American literary tradition of depicting white America’s horror of miscegenation and biracial women, including Nella Larsen’s two novels and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces. In Hopkins’s novel, a white male character purposefully ruins a woman’s reputation by spreading “the rumor that despite her creamy complexion [she] was of African descent.” Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 38. 23 The early twentieth-century troika of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey spurred provocative debates among Harlem Renaissance intelligentsia. Blacks and whites nationwide favored Booker T. Washington’s model of vocational education, as practiced in his Tuskegee Institute, and policy of accommodation to second-class citizenship for black Americans. Others aligned themselves with W.E.B. Du Bois and his promotion of a Talented Tenth, highly educated African-Americans whose academic and artistic accomplishments would dispel white racism. The third chapter of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” rebuts the plan laid out by Booker T. in his autobiography, Up From Slavery (1901). Du Bois’s stance in Souls portends his later political and literary activities; he believes that if he bares his soul, whites will recognize it as akin to theirs and realize that blacks and whites are brothers under the skin. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the United States, was a follower of Washington before extolling African and African-American self- sufficiency and proposing an exodus of black Americans to Africa. Although criticized for diverting attention away from solving the problem of American racism, Garvey’s “message was truly extraordinary,” writes David Levering 127

Because Plum Bun’s mulatta protagonist ingratiates herself in white society, Fauset has been criticized for pandering to white values and tastes.24 Rather, her literary forays demonstrate her appreciation of the multifaceted nature of black American life. In the 1920s most African

Americans still lived in the South, yet between 1916 and 1918 alone, the Great Migration brought over 400,000 to the urban North, leaving “at an average of over 16,000 per month, 500 per day” (Marks 1). Contrary to popular belief, many had been living in large southern cities for years, rather than in rural outposts, and arrived in the North with business acumen, job skills, and education similar to those of northern urban blacks.25 Angela Murray also moves North, leaving

Philadelphia for New York City.

Lewis (305). Few blacks acknowledged, let alone embraced, their African ancestry, and here was Garvey proclaiming that “European imperialism was fading away, that there was an interlocked destiny among people of color. They were to make ready to return to the land of their ancestors” (Levering Lewis 305). In 1914, Garvey founded the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association),23 “practically an uplift organization and literary and debating club all rolled into one” (Martin 3). Until 1925, when he was charged with mail fraud, jailed, and deported, Garvey was “perhaps the most celebrated and controversial black figure of his time” (Anderson 126). Thus the term “New Negro combined both a concern with history and cultural origins with a concern for racial heritage that would establish a positive public image. [. . .] For some intellectuals the term ‘New Negro’ had a militant working-class meaning; for others, it referred to an integrationist, middle-class cultural and artistic movement based in Harlem” (Cash 133). 24 Vashti Crutcher Lewis writes, “Given the autobiographical accounts of the psychological and emotional damage that black women have suffered in a culture that has defined them as ugly, it seems terribly contradictory that black women themselves chose to use consistently an image that suggests that only light-skinned black woman [sic] are attractive and that color is, and should be, an indication of class in the black community.” Vashti Crutcher Lewis, “The Declining Significance of the Mulatto Female as Major Character in the Novels of Zora Neale Hurston,” CLA, 28:2 (1984) 130-31. 25 Carole Marks, Farewell-We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989) 3. In addition, Fauset was not the only woman whose achievements were neglected. The Harlem Renaissance revolved around men as it took shape, often at women’s expense. In his introduction to The New Negro, Alain Locke “does not directly contemplate issues of gender [. . .], but with its imagery drawn from industry, technology, and war, and the extended citations of poems by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and James Weldon Johnson, the essay takes on a masculinist cast. [. . .] the New Negro seemed to be gendered male” (Wall, Women 4). A 1941 collection of Harlem Renaissance writing, The Negro Caravan, undermined its entries by women with derisive introductory essays and headnotes. Marita Bonner’s 1925 essay “On Being Young—A Woman—and Colored” exposes such prejudice with images of “stasis and claustrophobia, not change and movement” for women (Wall, Women 4). Ann duCille notes the “conventional notion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the so-called Harlem Renaissance as eras of exceptional black male intellectual and creative genius” (duCille, Coupling Convention 70). 128

On Her Own

Angela’s decision to pass stems largely from an experience in a hometown art class, initially a creative outlet with supportive peers, but in the end a humiliating defeat. When her white teacher expels her upon learning she is black, after having mentored her as a prize pupil,

Angela determines to reject what prevents her from attaining her goals—her “race.” Like her mother before her, she rationalizes her decision. “Was there something inherently wrong in

‘passing?’ Her mother had never seemed to consider it as anything but a lark” (PB 73), Angela thinks, deceiving herself as to what is at stake if she carries out her plans. It “isn’t being coloured that makes the difference,” she says to Jinny; “it’s letting it be known” (PB 78).

Keeping the information to herself, then, will enable a life where people are “not necessarily great, but real, alive, free and untrammelled in manner and thought” (PB 88). Equally strong is

Angela’s desire for “position, power, wealth.” For those, she muses, “ ‘I might marry—a white man. Marriage is the easiest way for a woman to get those things, and white men have them”

(PB 111-12). A white marital prospect appears to Angela in heir and bon vivant Roger Fielding.

Embarking on her relationship with Roger, Angela clings to the notion that they will soon get married. Like Jeffries in Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, however, Roger has a financial legacy to protect and desires a mistress, not a wife who might threaten it. In particular he fears his father, who places a premium on family honor—“No chorus girl romances” for him (PB 127).

After deciding that Angela possesses the requisite recklessness, Roger apprises her of his plan to keep her as his mistress in a city apartment or country cottage. When his intention dawns upon her, she is aghast and wonders how she might counter his presumption. “Oh if only she could be a girl in a book and when he finally did ask her for her hand, she would be able to tell him that she was going to marry someone else” (PB 183), she thinks. Rather than reject Roger’s offer 129

from a sense of self-worth, Angela fears being alone and considers denying him only if another man awaits her. She desires money and a room of her own not for independence and creativity, but through a husband who will bring her, she believes, privilege and prestige in white society.

Fauset demonstrates “that women’s traditional attitudes and expectations about marriage are romantic and impractical. Moreover, the corresponding marital role-playing dictated by

convention keeps women in stasis preventing their development of independence and autonomy”

(McDowell 89).

With marriage to Fielding anticipated but never achieved, Angela must provide for herself within a competitive market. Throughout the novel, Fauset excerpts lines from its epigraph—“To Market, To Market, / To Buy a Plum Bun; / Home again, Home again, / Market is done”—to knit together the personal and political in a society valuing women according to

their marital status. She therefore presents decent job opportunities for women in each of her novels.26 Plum Bun contains just one black maid, for instance, the Murrays’ housekeeper Hetty

Daniels.27 Nevertheless Fauset understands women’s economic vulnerability, for Angela

receives Fielding’s insulting proposition not because she is black but because she is poor.28

Targets of racist, sexist, and classist biases, Fauset’s unmarried female characters acquire

26 Fauset’s tactic dates back to 1861, when Harriet Jacobs concluded Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl “with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.” Jacobs rewrites conventional domestic fiction by resisting the conventional fairy-tale conclusion and demanding more realistic, hopeful lives for liberated slaves. See Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) 201. See also Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 104. 27 Several decades earlier, Frances Watkins Harper expressed similar sentiments when her character Iola Leroy states, “every woman should have some skill or art which would insure her at least a comfortable support. I believe there would be less unhappy marriages if labor were more honored among women.” Frances E.W. Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892. College Park, Maryland: McGrath Publishing Company, 1969) 210. 28 Fauset inverts the situation in her last novel, Comedy: American Style, in which a wealthy white man retracts his offer of marriage to a woman after learning she is partly black, claiming that under the circumstances, she is better suited to the role of mistress. 130

practical skills to thwart society’s denigrating expectations of them.29 In this manner Fauset

refuses to relinquish her characters to marriage until they establish themselves as unmarried

career women. Like Jean Rhys, she criticizes society’s obsession with marriage as a prerequisite

for women’s honor. Jinny is a gifted teacher and musician, Angela is an artist, and their mother

works hard all her life to support herself and her family. That some of Fauset’s heroines forego

their careers in favor of marriage does not advocate men’s careers over women’s, but seeks to

“explore the connection between male economic control over women and the ensuing loss of

women’s self” (Allen 10).

Yet marriage need not eradicate women’s subjectivity or artistry. In Fauset’s fiction, women work outside the home before, during, and after their marriages. That their careers sometimes become isolating and empty is due more to racism than to tyrannical or disapproving husbands.30 Marriage can in fact become an intellectual partnership of like-minded people, a

source of strength for African Americans, a “mutual sharing of intellectual interests and common

commitment to the ‘folk’ and the ‘race’” (Carby 80). Marriages based on racial treason or social

climbing, however, are doomed to fail, as Plum Bun demonstrates while exposing America’s

cultural distortions that compel such relationships in the first place. The novel’s complexity

arises from positing marriage as a viable option for women while “disavow[ing] the previous

centuries’ message that marriage in and of itself procures class stability or ascendancy for

women, especially black women” (Allen 63).

29 Joanna Marshall in Fauset’s There is Confusion supports herself through dancing. In the same novel, Maggie Elleresley learns sewing and then nursing to provide for herself, while Vera Manning passes as white to conduct race work in the South. Jessie Redmon Fauset, There is Confusion (1924. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989). 30 Mary Conde, “Passing in the Fiction of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nella Larsen,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 24 (1994) 89. 131

Modern Alternatives

As Harriet Jacobs courageously wrote of the sexual lives of female slaves, Fauset

explores women’s sexuality outside marriage. Reworking her predecessors’ vision of marriage

as civil liberty,31 she creates women characters who select “their marriage partners, or liaisons, to deny slavery’s legacy of black women being owned/raped by white men” (McLendon, Politics of

Color 74). Her female characters are “implicitly sexual beings, finely tuned to both the power

and the vulnerability of their own female bodies” (duCille, Coupling Convention 109) irrespective of their marital status. The first mention of female sexuality in Plum Bun concerns the Murrays’ housekeeper, Hetty. Drawing a picture of her for an art class assignment, Angela perceives the sublimated passion beneath Hetty’s tales of youthful, chaste romantic adventures, her “unslaked yearnings gleam[ing] suddenly out of her eyes, transforming her usually rather expressionless face into something wild and avid” (PB 66). Imbuing Hetty with brimming sexuality, Fauset rewrites the stereotypical insensate black female domestic. Unfortunately,

Angela’s interest in her is purely academic as she considers which representation of her will most impress her teacher. “ ‘If I could just get that look for Mr. Shields,’ Angela said half aloud

to herself, ‘I bet I could get any of their old scholarships’” (PB 66).

Internalizing the racism and sexism directed toward black women, Angela fails to wonder

why Hetty denies her sexuality to obsess over chastity instead. Worse, she assumes her white

male teacher’s automatic approval of a portrait of a sexualized black woman. Angela’s

patriarchal and, as yet, puritanical attitudes resurface in her shock at seeing men’s toiletries in

her white friend Paulette’s apartment. Paulette finds Angela’s innocence incredible, along with

her conviction that a sexual liaison must lead to marriage. Angela maintains “the values of

Victorian middle-class morality [. . .] at a time when other American women were breaking away 132

from outdated Victorian standards” (Cash 8). Paulette prefers independence to sharing a man’s status and money.

Sexually active white women in Plum Bun invert racist notions of black women’s

promiscuity.32 Although Paulette claims to view people as either distinctly male or female, in

truth she recognizes androgyny by rejecting conventional mores for women, particularly

marriage.33 Her comment to Angela that she would “rather have a good woman friend any day”

(PB 103) resonates with Virginia Woolf’s disclosure in A Room of One’s Own that Chloe liked

Olivia.34 Paulette drinks, smokes, eats heartily, has numerous lovers, and resents Angela’s

calling her “conspicuously feminine” (PB 105). Martha Burden, another of Angela’s white

friends, lives with her husband before marriage and hosts salons in her Greenwich Village

apartment. Yet Angela discovers that beneath the women’s bohemian sophistication lie rootless,

vapid lives. Paulette has no one to trust and Martha compensates for her lackluster marriage by

busying herself with parties, which Angela finds boring. Suddenly the old conversations about

race she had found so tiresome—“the men talking painfully of rents, of lynchings” (PB 116)—

acquire new relevance. Passing as white, she learns that white women disconnected from home

and family are no likelier to find happiness than she is.

Paulette and Martha also initiate Angela into the duplicitous rituals of courtship. To

attract men, Martha laments, women cannot be themselves but must prevaricate and be coy.

Angela also finds such a scenario unacceptable, disregarding the fact that by passing for white

she too forms relationships based on dishonesty. She treats courtship as a game in which “men

paid a big price for their desires. Her price would be marriage” (PB 183). As her affair with

31 duCille, The Coupling Convention 144. 32 Jacquelyn Y. McClendon, The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen (Charlottesville, London: University Press of Virginia, 1995) 37. 33 I borrow the phrase from Carolyn Heilbrun’s Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973). 133

Roger goes on, however, her suppressed sexuality emerges. Initially viewing her passion as “an

enemy with whom she never thought to reckon,” she eventually concedes that Roger’s “constant

attention, flatteries and caresses were producing their inevitable effect. [. . .] Gradually his

demands seemed to her to represent a very natural and beautiful impulse” (PB 198-99).

Overwhelmed by desire, she agrees to become Roger’s mistress, belying criticism of Fauset’s

novels as prudish and conventional.35 Instead, they envision women embracing their sexuality, if for initially dubious reasons.36

Angela only partly dispenses with conventional social and sexual codes, for Martha’s warnings haunt her when Roger’s interest starts to wane. She wonders whether she might model herself after the lives she reads of in books, yet the disintegrating story line of her affair with

Roger, along with her refusal to acknowledge her former life, prevents her from creating a viable narrative for herself. If recovering past narratives is the key to developing subjectivity, then

Angela cannot successfully storytell herself into identity.37 Instead she diverts her attention toward men: If they abhor women’s love and devotion, “then a successful relationship between the sexes must depend wholly on the marriage tie without reference to compatibility of taste, training, or ideals” (PB 226). Marriage is no longer the key to women’s happiness, Angela now thinks, just a legal means of keeping a man. When Roger tries to win her back, she feels betrayed not by him but by the books she had trusted wherein “the man who had treated his

34 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957). 35 Nathan Huggins writes, “the truly genteel values of uplift, self-perfection, and honor burden all of Miss Fauset’s novels and give all of her approved Negro characters the image of conventional respectability.” Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) 148. 36 Floris Barnett Cash explains black clubwomen’s concerted efforts to overcome degrading “externally defined notions of black womanhood” (39). Floris Barnett Cash, African American Women and Social Action: The Clubwomen and Volunteerism from Jim Crow to the New Deal, 1896-1936 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001). 37 I discuss Angela in language adapted from Henry Louis Gates’s Signifying Monkey, in which he calls Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God a speakerly text whose heroine speaks herself into identity. Gates equates the novel with slave narratives, in which people denied normal means of self-identification engage rhetorical strategies necessary to write themselves into human subjects. 134

sweetheart unkindly often returned beaten, dejected, even poverty-stricken” (PB 317); Roger is as haughty as ever. Angela confronts the two-fold realization that books are incapable of providing useful life lessons and that marriage is often economically, not emotionally, based.

With a little introspection, she would realize that attaining wealth through marriage was her

underlying hope to begin with.

Angela discards the notion of marrying white as a way to trump racism and become rich.

Her ensuing ideal of marriage remains delusional, if less superficial, however, as she now daydreams about Anthony Cross, also an African-American artist, although each believes the other is white. She envisions the two of them living in genteel poverty, working on their art and helping other struggling black artists to succeed. The idea germinates as she considers her

African-American classmate, Miss Powell, whose talent Angela recognizes and wishes to promote in the guise of a white patron. Removed from her African-American community,

Angela fails to understand that white patronage is not what every black artist desires, regardless of need. Although important to the Harlem Renaissance, “the white presence, at least in the early years, hovered over the New Negro world of art and literature like a benevolent censor, politely but pervasively setting the outer limits of its creative boundaries” (Levering Lewis 98).

Fauset herself occupied a unique position, possessing no wealth or benefactor of her own but the capability, given her position at The Crisis, to promote and publish young writers.38

Angela is oblivious to her conflation of race and finance. Her main concern is marriage as “an end in itself, for women certainly; the only, the most desirable and natural end” (PB 274).

Considering Paulette’s lovers, Angela does not malign her friend but knows she herself is not cut out for such a lifestyle. Angela believes she needs the “safety, the assurance of relationship that marriage affords” (PB 275), yet her ongoing obsession with passing for white renders her goal 135

unattainable. She laments that the “dark blood in her veins” (PB 272) keeps Anthony and her from uniting; even her desire to assist other black women is tainted by her avowal to keep her

heritage a secret.39 Her misguided conceptions of marriage, race loyalty, and self-interest

prolong her loneliness.

Lacking Examples

Angela’s views of marriage stem from dubious examples, as Plum Bun contains no exemplary marriage to which its female characters might aspire. Philadelphia’s segregated hospitals cause Mattie and Junius Murray to deny each other so that Mattie can receive proper health care. When he arrives to take her home from the whites-only hospital, he pretends to be her chauffeur.40 Mattie, in turn, wills herself to die after Junius’s death, which her daughters find

romantic, a sign of their parents’ love for each other. That Mattie feels her only option without a

man by her side is death, however, highlights the solitary woman’s terror of insult and poverty.

Roger Fielding, with his outdated notions of women’s purity, coerces Martha Burden into

marrying Ladislas Starr after learning they were living together unwed. His hypocrisy astounds

Angela, for he tells of threatening to beat Ladislas, despite his and Angela’s lopsided affair. (She

remains oblivious to her own contradictions, vowing to keep her race a secret while abhorring

Roger’s suggestion that their relationship remain hidden.) Angela’s Jewish friend Rachel is

devastated when her parents forbid her to marry her Catholic fiancé. Intolerance and injustice

within American society infect all of the relationships Angela sees.

38 Wall, Women 36. 39 Clubwomen were convinced, writes Cash, that the poor/underclass masses required social refinement, a stance that often bred resentment in those they tried to help. Angela is similarly inclined toward philanthropy, yet by withholding the truth of her race, she angers and alienates people as well. 40 In the early twentieth century, “more than twice as many blacks as whites in Philadelphia required hospital care [. . .] ‘sickness was more prevalent among blacks than among Germans, Irish, or native Americans and [. . .] was the 136

After Anthony reveals he is black, Angela believes she is ready to make the supreme sacrifice of “labeling” herself black, too (PB 294), but only to him. By this point her thinking is so convoluted, she believes acknowledging her race would be more of a lie than concealing it.

Desperate for companionship, Angela would “let go if need be of her cherished independence, lead a double life, move among two sets of acquaintances” (PB 252) rather than return fully to the African-American community, if only she were married. “In ‘passing’ from one race to the other she had done no harm to anyone,” she thinks, continuing to deceive herself. “Indeed she had been forced to take this action” (PB 308), a conclusion reflecting her dubious reasons for passing in the first place: her refusal to accept responsibility for her choices and her desire for material wealth.

In particular, Angela plays the naïf regarding her deteriorating relationship with her sister. “Something had brought an irrevocable separation” between them, she thinks, forgetting her earlier rejection of Jinny when she follows her to New York (PB 315, emphasis added). She recalls ignoring and humiliating her repeatedly, fearing that anyone seeing them together would suspect that she was black. “ ‘And anyway,’ ” Angela rationalizes, “ ‘Mamma didn’t speak to

Papa that day we were standing on the steps of the Hotel Walton’” (PB 161). Using her mother’s actions to justify her own, she perpetuates the cycle by which passing and color-consciousness damage African-American families. Angela’s permanent passing results in “high social costs, such as separation from family, loneliness, and most important of all, the constant threat of exposure” (Gatewood 175). Although she misses her sister, she will admit no betrayal, still convinced that remaining noncommittal about her race exonerates her.

chief cause of black poverty.’ In addition, in most hospitals blacks met with discriminatory treatment, further exacerbating their conditions.” Marks 147-8. 137

As Jinny explains, though, “in a negative way, merely by saying nothing, you’re

disclaiming your black blood in a country where it is an inconvenience” (PB 171). With her

heightened racial awareness, Jinny belies Angela’s conviction that a black woman in America

cannot achieve success and selfhood. Although underestimated and infantilized by nearly

everyone around her, referred to as a baby or child, thought to be “mulling happily over the small

affairs which kept her a little girl” (PB 349), she is in fact far more mature than her older sister.

She values family and home and works diligently in her profession. She rejects Angela’s white

milieu for black Harlem instead, establishing herself in its social and political scenes, befriending

writers and artists, and attending lectures on racial uplift.

On a rare visit to Harlem, Angela is impressed with Jinny’s crowd, the Harlem

intellectuals “living cheek by jowl with coarse or ill-bred or even criminal, certainly indifferent,

members of their race” (PB 326).41 Yet she sees the night’s keynote speaker, race leader Van

Meier, as a “statue of an East Indian idol” possessing a “completeness, a superb lack of self-

consciousness, an odd, arresting beauty” (PB 218). Instead of paying attention to his speech on the country’s race problems, she situates him outside her world as foreign, unusual, an anomaly.

Downtrodden audience members reaffirm Angela’s belief that it is better to be wealthy and live a lie than to be poor, peace of mind notwithstanding. That “clear mind of hers warned her again and again that there was nothing inherently wrong or mean or shameful in the stand which she had taken,” Fauset writes, critiquing Angela’s distorted viewpoint (PB 332, emphasis added).

Throughout her experiences, Angela’s mind is anything but clear, having adapted so

many of white society’s racist tenets. She denounces her classmate’s determination to persevere

41 Clubwomen’s history indicates the black middle- and upper-class’s lasting sense of responsibility to those less well off than they. Jinny and Angela’s experience of Harlem is contrary to another theory of racial uplift, that “the ‘respectables’ of the race, those who possessed moral character and virtue, should draw a dividing line between themselves and those blacks lacking such attributes” (Gatewood 23). 138

through hard work and self-sufficiency, as opposed to racial masking. Describing Miss Powell’s mother as “helpless and grunting and sweating” (PB 348), she participates in the dehumanization of African-American women. Mrs. Powell is actually quite perceptive, calling Angela a fool not, as Angela thinks, for finally acknowledging her background and sacrificing a cash prize but for having denied her heritage at all, for any reason or period of time. Complicating matters, however, is Angela’s understanding of injustice in American society. She cites her hometown’s

“actual economic and social slavery, its iniquitous school system, its prejudiced theatres, its limited offering of occupation” (PB 261), vowing never to return. Presenting Philadelphia and

New York as hotbeds of bigotry, Fauset establishes how racism encircles African Americans wherever they go.

Angela Modernizing

America’s growing race prejudice in the early twentieth century elucidates Angela’s conflicted psyche. She adeptly rearranges the past to accord with her present circumstances or emotions, recalling her decision to pass as springing from an unhappy childhood. Years later, distraught and confused in New York, she wallows in nostalgia for an exaggeratedly idyllic youth. At another point, she claims her unhappiness to have begun in adolescence, on the day her white friend rejects her after learning she is African American. At the time, Angela contextualizes the insult amid the “dark and tortured spaces of her difficult life,” in which her relationship with her white friend Mary “had been a lovely, hidden refuge” (PB 38, emphasis added). In retrospect, explaining to Jinny her decision to pass, she remarks on this “first hurt through Mary Hastings” (PB 77). Revising the past reflects a mind not yet capable of 139 assimilating devastating incidents, denoting the self-invention necessarily enacted by African-

American women.

Angela ultimately commits herself to Cross’s project of reclaiming their racial heritage.

For Fauset, then, “ ‘Happily-ever-after’ is not marriage to a handsome, wealthy prince but realization and acceptance of the virtues of the black cultural experience” (McDowell 92). That a man and the promise of marriage lead her to such a realization indicates not women’s submission to men, but the struggle involved in weighing choices and making sound decisions.

While Angela professes repeatedly to be happily rid of her “race,” it is clear that her African-

American family and peers have profoundly influenced her. She recalls late-night debates in her family’s kitchen over the merits and drawbacks of modes of racial uplift. Impatient and bored with such talk at the time, she nevertheless allowed it into her consciousness so that when facing conflict in her own life, she rehearses the conversations. She sympathizes with an African-

American family turned away from a restaurant, follows Miss Powell’s career carefully, and finally longs for a truce with Jinny and a reconnection with her home and community. That

Angela’s fate is perhaps tied to a man’s at the novel’s end does not relinquish women to conventional social norms, but signifies Fauset’s “generally balanced and optimistic attitude toward life” (Sylvander 83).

Although Angela and Anthony appear to resolve their problems, and Jinny becomes engaged, Plum Bum demonstrates that marriage alone cannot mask or make up for women’s thwarted selfhood. Fauset moves beyond her literary forebears and her own earlier novel in rejecting marriage as the primary means of self-fulfillment for black women. The anticipated marriages of Angela and Jinny suggest women might construct their identity in relationships with men, but the novel’s final scenes resist such a facile presumption. Plum Bun’s 140

indeterminate conclusion empowers women by refusing to abandon them to convention, a word

bearing little meaning in a rapidly changing society.

Angela’s missteps reveal the difficulties African-American women face amid the double threat of racism and sexism. Finding no solace among whites, only greater alienation from self, family, and community, Angela realizes she must shape her identity on a less superficial foundation. Living in Europe as the novel concludes, she explains to a white suitor that they can never marry, for although she may continue to pass at times, from now on she is “on the coloured side” (PB 373). Marriage between African Americans and whites is sure to become too complicated, she says, concurring now with the opinions of Van Meier. “He had no brief”

against interracial marriage, she recalls, “though, because of the high social forfeit levied, he did

not advocate its practice in America” (PB 265).42 Nella Larsen depicts the devastating forfeits of

interracial marriage in her novels, Quicksand and Passing.

Nella Larsen

With her black West Indian and Danish heritage, Nella Larsen possessed an acute

understanding of racial prejudice and the need to abolish false paradigms. Her 1926 short story,

“The Wrong Man,” portends her later works’ investigations into women’s threatened selfhood.

The story’s heroine, Julia Romley, feels her world collapsing when, at a high society ball with

her wealthy husband, she sees Ralph Tyler, who had kept her as a mistress years ago when she

was poor. Julia and her husband are a “happy married pair,” but “their obvious joy in each other

after five wedded years” (Complete Fiction 5) is unlikely, she believes, to withstand knowledge

42 Interracial marriage was extremely controversial for both races in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like passing and color consciousness, interracial marriage presented blacks with “a web of ambiguities and incongruities,” catching them “between pressures from within the black community, which placed a premium on 141

of the affair. She asks Tyler to meet her in a secluded area where, shrouded in darkness, she

pleads with him to withhold his information from her husband. When the man speaks, she realizes that he is not Ralph Tyler; she “had told the wrong man” of her past (CF 9). Like

Larsen’s later works, “The Wrong Man” explores “strategies of concealment, self-invention, and

passing in her fiction” (Wall, Women 88), suggesting the fragility of women’s subjectivity amid

uneven gender relations. Julia’s fear of divorce reflects that “marriage is often a precarious

balancing act, especially when spouses have not been honest with each other and have concealed

aspects of their former lives” (Larson 59-60). The inability of marriage to safeguard women is a

prevalent theme in Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, whose mulatta heroine, Helga Crane, limns

bordering but disconnected worlds.

The mulatta character in American fiction originates in abolitionist literature, where she appears as the inevitable outcome of miscegenation.43 Withstanding prejudice on both sides of

the color line, the tragic mulatta is generally depicted as a beautiful woman superior in

refinement and virtue to the whites among whom she lives.44 In antislavery literature, she

suggests “both the acceptability and the propriety of love and even marriage across lines of

color” (Bruce 295), yet “caught between two worlds, [. . .] the result of an illicit relationship, she

suffers from a melancholy of the blood that inevitably leads to tragedy” (Christian 16). At times, mulatto characters represent a spirit of rebellion, belying prejudiced notions of African

Americans as meek and subservient.45 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, contains mulatto figures

possessing “the restiveness and unwillingness to serve associated with the Anglo-Saxon

race loyalty and solidarity, and those from the ‘dominant race,’ which was increasingly determined to place several proscriptions on all Negroes of whatever color or condition” (Gatewood 177, 179). 43 Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980) 16. 44 Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865 (Charlottesville, London: University of Virginia Press, 2001) 295-6. 45 Christian 21. 142

personality” (Christian 21). Plum Bun reveals similar stereotypes at play when Jinny attributes

Angela’s callousness to an extra infusion of white blood.

The mulatta in African-American women’s fiction is particularly controversial, often

reproved as an author’s means of garnering acceptance and sales from white readers. Frances

Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy met with such criticism, although the novel actually praises those

who could pass for white but choose to remain aligned with the disempowered race.46 Rather

than reinforce white standards, mulatta characters serve as strategies for creating “a visual bridge

or a graphic link between the white face of the mulatto and the black body of the slave” (duCille,

Coupling Convention 7-8). They act as narrative devices whereby the machinations of racism

might be better scrutinized,47 for African-American women could never meet America’s

standards of female virtue, based as they were on a sexist, racist mythology.48 If the mulatta was

“the only type of black woman beautiful enough to be a popular heroine” (Christian 22), in

Larsen’s fiction, her physical beauty only exacerbates her loneliness on the cusp of black and

white worlds. In Quicksand, Larsen “consciously intensified the pathos and hollowness of the middle-class mulatta heroine image” (Christian 47). Living in the rural South or urban North, in

Europe or America, Helga suffers the disintegration of her identity among competing visions of black and white womanhood.

46 Ann duCille writes, “African American scholars as critically diverse as literary theorist Houston Baker and feminist critic Barbara Christian are united in the opinion that nineteenth-century black women novelists such as Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper wrote under the influence of white America, creating inauthentic light-skinned mulatta characters designed to accommodate their white readers’ tastes in heroines.” Rather, for both Harper and Pauline Hopkins, duCille believes, the “mulatta figure was both a rhetorical device and a political strategy” (Coupling Convention 7), 47 Carby 89. 48 Cash notes, “Black women have a different cultural history from white women. The experience of black women scarcely resembled the established norms, yet true womanhood remained the ideal toward which all women should aspire” (7). 143

Quicksand

Quicksand begins with Helga contemplating her unhappiness as a teacher at Naxos, a

southern vocational school modeled after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in

Alabama. Suffocated by the school’s insistence upon conformity, insulted by its unimaginative

approach to education, she scorns its policies and considers herself a cog in its machine: “Life

had died out of it. It was, Helga decided, now only a big knife with cruelly sharp edges

ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern” (Quicksand 39). The suppression of

color, exuberance, creativity, and spontaneity had resulted in a depressing place “smug and fat

with self-satisfaction” (Q 39). Her experience reflects Larsen’s own brief tenure at Tuskegee, from which she “departed so disillusioned,” writes her biographer, Thadious Davis, “that for the rest of her life she was cynical and contemptuous of all programs for racial uplift and suspicious of anyone espousing such programs” (90). Ann Hostetler further explains, “That Naxos is an anagram for ‘Saxon’ reveals the institutional program: to adopt white values and to create from the multiplicity of black persons a ‘machine’ of dull conformity” (38). Helga’s distrust of mechanistic education engages one of modernism’s greatest concerns: the erosion of human society into a vast, impersonal machine.

In her “comfortable room, furnished with rare and intensely personal taste,” Helga enjoys

books, lovely clothes, “many-colored nasturtiums,” and “oriental silk” (Q 35). Decorating her

room thusly, she rejects her employers’ policy of drab uniformity. Addressing these dueling

philosophies, Larsen situates black life both within and beyond rural boundaries. She does not reject agrarianism but focuses upon that which exploits it, such as Naxos’s insistence upon robotic students. Similar to Fauset’s, Larsen’s fiction reconceptualizes African-American life as other than rural. “In Larsen’s view, to succumb to a preexisting paradigm [such as agrarianism] 144

means to accept one pattern, one stereotype, at the expense of growth or change” (Hostetler 44).

Helga does not disparage her black colleagues and students; rather she recognizes the dangerous

alliance between northern industrialization and repressive southern traditions. Naxos’s production of gloomy black children propagates white majority values, Helga believes, dispelling notions of the rural South as black America’s natural milieu.

The Great Migration of African-Americans similarly “shook the foundation of

Washington’s philosophy and confirmed the inadequacy of his program for industrial education

that would have tied the black to an antiquated, preindustrial southern economy” (Singh 7).

Helga’s mistrust of Naxos resonates with Theodor Adorno’s critique of mass culture. To use

Adorno’s terms, the white power structure firmly in place at Naxos renders the black population

“not primary, but secondary, [. . .] an appendage of the machinery” (99). The so-called

intellectuals running the school produce unthinking masses following dictatorial regimes. As

Helga realizes, the lessons learned from such an education are “vacuous, banal or worse, and the

behavior patterns are shamelessly conformist” (Adorno 103). She pities the children forced to

imbibe such lessons and recognizes the threats posed to her own identity as well.49

In addition, Helga ruefully considers her fiancé James Vayle, a colleague who thrives at

Naxos and who would likely be relieved were she to leave him, discomfited as he is by her lack of family connections. Vayle is one of many African Americans preoccupied with ancestry and lineage, as “[f]amily name and tradition (inextricably linked to an emphasis on and access to education, the white power structure, and a relatively high standard of living [. . .]) continued to function as social stratifiers” (Gatewood 102-3). Long resigned to her disparaged background— her white mother and black father, who may not have been married— Helga is more disturbed by 145

the sense that Vayle desires her only sexually. While she mocks a dormitory matron for

remaining single due to “things in the matrimonial state that were of necessity entirely too

repulsive for a lady of delicate and sensitive nature to submit to” (Q 46), she denies her own

sexuality by subscribing to patriarchal notions of women’s chastity. As single women of color,

neither Helga nor the matron can express erotic desire without censure.

Helga’s conflicting views of sex and marriage are paramount in Quicksand, as her

overwhelming sexual urges, suppressed and misunderstood, compel her most disastrous

decisions. After leaving Naxos, she heads to Chicago, where she was born, eager to establish

herself in a familiar environment more congenial to her beliefs. She undergoes the same

rejection she experienced as a child, however, when her maternal uncle’s white wife refuses to

acknowledge her. Seeking employment, she learns she is overqualified, as the only work

available to black women is housecleaning. While Fauset envisions finer careers for women,

Larsen depicts educated, middle-class women of color still relegated to the lowest-paying jobs on

the market.50 World War I provided many women, black and white, with more lucrative industrial or government jobs yet most returned to domestic service when the war concluded.51

Heading North

Many young black women moving from South to North benefited from help along the way. The Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina, the White Rose Travelers’ Aid Society in New York City, and the Phillis Wheatley Home in Chicago were among many institutions

49 Many African-Americans believed industrial education “was an extension of white supremacy [. . .] a moral paradigm intended to inculcate the virtue of industry” and that “advocates of industrial education worked to accomplish moral regeneration and social control” (Cash 25). 50 “Upon arriving in the North, black women were employed predominantly as domestics. Most migrants experienced difficulty finding employment and housing. Some women were taken advantage of, lost their money, or were drawn into vice, crime, and even prostitution” (Cash 96). 51 Cash 58. 146

providing housing and instruction for women and families new to northern cities. Members of

the National Association of Colored Women, founded in 1896, engaged in activities ranging

from opening orphanages and old-age homes to teaching poor women domestic arts for gainful

employment. Committed to social responsibilities, clubwomen succored migrant women and

girls, which is more than any Englishwoman ever did for Jean Rhys or her heroines. In

Quicksand, however, Helga meets not a clubwoman but a female race leader who offers her a job

as her personal secretary. At this juncture, Helga’s white blood becomes a liability, for she is

given the job only after promising never to reveal her heritage to anyone in black Harlem. With

Helga heading off to her third destination in as many months, Larsen presents “the full

complexity of the modern alienated individual” (Carby 170). Helga suspects her sense of

dislocation results from poor choices, primarily from trying to bridge clashing worlds.

Like Rhys’s female characters, Helga believes marriage holds the key to material survival. Yet she resents how marriage reduces women to sexual objects, even while recognizing it as the only option for women with nowhere else to turn. “Even foolish, despised women must have food and clothing; even unloved little Negro girls must somehow be provided for” (Q 56), she thinks, remembering her white mother’s second marriage “to a man of her own race, but not of her own kind” (Q 56) when Helga was young. She recalls her stepfamily’s disdain and concludes that marriage alone cannot guarantee affection or overcome prejudice.

And so, enjoying the vibrancy of black Harlem, Helga believes she will one day marry an

African-American man and attain what she covets: “a home [. . .], cars of expensive makes [. . .], clothes and furs [. . .], servants, and leisure” (Q 77). Although she envisions her husband as black rather than white, Helga resembles Angela Murray in Plum Bun in viewing marriage as a 147 means of wealth and conspicuous consumption.52 Helga, at least, is more racially sensitive and slightly less materialistic in also desiring “laughing, appealing dark-eyed children” (Q 77).

Larsen anticipated enjoying similar benefits, namely the “entry into a privileged African-

American world,” when she married Dr. Elmer Samuel Imes, a research physicist, in 1919

(Davis 121). Helga also hopes to become accepted via respectable marriage.53

Harlem’s charms soon wear off, however. Once intrigued by programs of racial uplift,

Helga comes to view them as assimilation to white values. Although her friend Anne Grey despises white people, in Helga’s opinion “she aped their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of living” (Q 80). More to the fact, Anne’s “constant prattling of the incongruities, the injustices, the stupidities, the viciousness of white people” (Q 80) arouses in

Helga suppressed memories of her own ill treatment by whites, notably her relatives.54 She resists exploring the psychological experience of being mulatta, just as she denies the sexual feelings kindled by her encounter with Naxos’s principal, Robert Anderson. When she sees him at a Harlem meeting in a seat near hers, a “peculiar, not wholly disagreeable quiver ran down her spine. She felt an odd little faintness. The blood rushed to her face” (Q 81).

52 Gatewood explains that the “ ‘aristocratic instincts’ of upper-class blacks imbued them with desires for the tastefully furnished homes, libraries, travel, and entertainment that only a substantial degree of economic security could provide” (206). Thadious M. Davis also writes that the black bourgeoisie “differentiated itself from the generally poor, early twentieth-century African-American community by engaging in forms of conspicuous consumption and entertainment.” Thadious M. Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994) 5. 53 Davis writes, “for the African-American female, particularly if she came from the working class, an advantageous marriage was empowering. A publicly sanctioned institution gave her respectability, with a status and a title long denied her by slavery and segregation. The married African-American woman achieved not only an improved place in the larger society but also a transformed self-perception. She was freer to pursue her own interests without challenges to her morals or good name” (128). 54 Those critical of assimilationists referred to them as “codfish aristocrats” who “functioned as divisive forces in the black community at a time when unity was most needed to combat racial oppression. Although critics of the fair- skinned elite were genuinely concerned about racial pride and solidarity, their rhetoric also revealed envy and jealousy” (Gatewood 153). Such is the case with Helga, who feels betrayed by blacks’ accommodation of whites given her own horrific experience with her white relatives. 148

Later in bed, she remembers the first “explosive contact” with Anderson— her

resignation from Naxos—and again feels “a sort of aching delirium” and a “thousand indefinite

longings” (Q 82). Helga’s failure to name her feelings has been read as Larsen’s reluctance to

explore sexuality. Jeffrey Gray believes that “in order to avoid primitivist stereotypes,” Larsen

had to “make Helga a model of chastity and education, a person who never uses dialect, who

disapproves of nightclubs, dance, and promiscuity” (257). On the contrary, as Jacquelyn Y.

McLendon writes, “Imagery evocative of sexual desire and orgasmic release is present from the

very beginning of the novel, at first vague and indefinite but increasingly specific” (“Self-

Representation” 154). Helga understands James Vayle’s sexual yearnings for her, and is herself attracted sexually to Robert Anderson. She lusts after and seduces the Reverend Green; early in their marriage, she eagerly awaits him in bed each night. Hazel Carby views Helga as “the first truly sexual black female protagonist in Afro-American fiction” (174), as throughout the novel

Larsen depicts the profound effects of sexuality on women’s identity construction.55

Wandering

Associating her unhappiness with her present location, Helga comes to detest Harlem, where race work appalls her and cabarets only augment her terrible sexual yearnings.56

Eventually she attributes her disquiet to being “shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race

[. . .]. Why, she demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised black folk?”

(Q 86) Finding no compelling reason, she leaves Harlem and goes to her relatives in Denmark,

55 Jean Rhys does, too, but as discussed in the previous chapter, the women in her novels are often coerced into sex, or engage in sex joylessly and fearfully, preoccupied with other matters. 56 Clubwomen’s preoccupation with purity and decorum led to their condemnation of “indigenous forms of black music, such as ragtime and blues,” which many considered “just another aspect of the ‘Negro world’ they wished to be rid of. Most respectable women considered ragtime and jazz obscene because of their origin in brothels” (Cash 48). 149 indulging in another binary Larsen dismantles: African and African-American primitivism versus

European civilization. In much African-American literature, “Europe functions as a way of altering positionality, and thus as a means of finding one’s way out of notions of ‘essence’”

(Gray 260). Forced by black Harlem to deny her white heritage, Helga envisions Europe as an environment free of racial bias. Jessie Fauset took frequent trips to Europe, mainly Paris, where she relished the “absence of petty prejudice that shadowed her life at home” (Wall, Women 72).

Young black women in Europe, she believed, had a better chance of finding themselves.

Sending characters overseas may be a “well-known literary device for getting oneself out of trouble” (Conde 99), yet for African Americans, life abroad often compounds their psychic trauma, particularly for someone like Helga, who leaves the United States primarily to flee her racial identity. Poet Gwendolyn Bennett found Paris “a cold and lonely place” for an African-

American woman; certain of its literati rebuffed Fauset, perhaps because of her color (Wall,

Women xiv, 72).57 Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay encountered overt prejudice during his trip to England in 1919. Expecting to be embraced for his talent and breeding, assuming the

“special bonds of affection and tradition between Great Britain and her colonies [. . .], he discovered quickly that the average Briton had not the remotest idea that they shared at least a common culture of school and court, let alone any notion of equality between them” (Levering

Lewis 50), similar to Jean Rhys’s experience upon arriving in London from Dominica. In addition, the charms of Paris and Toulouse fail to alleviate the Cary women’s misery in Fauset’s

Comedy: American Style. While Europe may embody “a different or at least a differently

57 During one of her trips to Paris, Fauset sent a note to Sylvia Beach, proprietor of Shakespeare & Company, asking to meet her. Beach ignored the request (Wall, Women 72). 150

perceived white people” (Gray 260), in Larsen’s fiction—and often in reality—it fails to provide

security to women of color.58

Ensconced in her aunt and uncle’s house in Copenhagen, Helga revels in the attention lavished upon her. Initially embarrassed by the revealing clothing they buy for her, she settles comfortably into her role as the Dahls’ curious ornament, succumbing “to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired” (Q 104). At last, she feels, she can obtain “not money, but the things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things.

Things. Things” (Q 97). When she surveys Copenhagen’s immaculate streets and clean, blond, pink Danes, her disgust with America’s black community grows, along with her disregard, similar to Angela Murray’s, of the link between American classism and bigotry. Helga praises

Denmark’s poor for having scrubbed homes, neat women, and properly clothed children, heedless of the racism that leads to, exacerbates, and prolongs African-American poverty.59

Resenting America’s treatment of blacks, she confusedly blames black people instead of white— for starting families, for example, and perpetuating cycles of oppression. She believes having children, “little, helpless, unprotesting Negro children,” is “a sin, an unforgivable outrage” (Q

104), for they will only be despised and lynched. In Denmark, she forgets about her former desire for a dark husband and children.

Helga believes life in Europe will be liberating, when in fact she becomes more economically and psychologically powerless than before.60 Her aunt and uncle assume the role

of managers,61 selecting her wardrobe, parading her through town, using her to ingratiate

themselves in the upper echelons of society. They exoticize her black heritage, as all of Europe

58 Wall, Women 56. 59 Helga’s attitude reflects those of America’s late Victorian age, with its double standards “for the rich and the poor. The social code stressed cleanliness and neatness” (Cash 8), equating both with moral superiority. 60 Davis 265. 151

exoticized Josephine Baker, reinventing her as their personal Hottentot Venus. White Harlem’s

fascination with primitivism has followed Helga across the sea to challenge her notion of

Europe—and herself—as racially neutral. The Dahls and their social circle flock to Helga

because they see her as a curiosity. Her education, fine manners, and physical beauty perversely

reaffirm their belief that “ ‘mixed bloods’ were hybrids, morally weak, and physically

degenerate” (Gatewood 150). Nella Larsen, like Jean Rhys, thus reconfigures modernist Anglo

representations of spiritual rebirth in primitive settings and, conversely, the association of

primitivism with moral and spiritual corruption. Both impulses appear in Joseph Conrad’s Heart

of Darkness (1902), for instance, in its schizoid condemnation of British imperialism and

dehumanization of Africans.62

Helga’s objectification is fully realized in the portrait of her painted by a prominent local artist. During her sittings with Axel Olsen, she cannot discern whether his growing interest in her is professionally or personally motivated. “Was it, she wondered, race that kept him silent, held him back?” (Q 107) Her Aunt Katrina encourages the match, for it will lend her and her husband prestige, yet Helga rejects interracial marriage for bringing “only trouble—to the children—as she herself knew but too well from bitter experience” (Q 108). Helga becomes fascinated with Olsen precisely because of his racial difference, however, as he exists outside the

“restricted society of American Negroes” (Q 107) with whom she had grown so impatient. Far

61 Wall, Women 122. 62 In Heart of Darkness, Marlow and his crew travel up the Congo and peer into forests lining the shore. Marlow describes the natives’ wild dances, costumes, headdresses, and weaponry, and an exotic, feral woman clad in thick, shiny brass fittings. She is a “wild and gorgeous apparition of woman” with “innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step” (Conrad 1804). She presages Helga in Denmark, dressed by the Dahls in “batik dresses [. . .], dresses of velvet and chiffon in screaming colors” and “turbanlike hats of metallic silks, feathers, and furs, strange jewelry, enameled or set with odd semiprecious stones” (Quicksand 103). The Orientalist language in both works exoticizes the black woman “like the wilderness itself” (Conrad 1804)—unthinking, with no voice or identity of her own. Whereas in Conrad’s fiction she serves to highlight Western cultural authority, in Larsen’s she recasts Europeans as prejudiced, 152

from being “honored by a proposal of marriage to a highly regarded and handsome portrait

painter” (Huggins 158), Helga is shocked, as the proposal confirms her suspicion that one of his

earlier comments was indeed the insulting proposition she had surmised. Like Roger Fielding in

Plum Bun, Olsen suggests marriage only when the woman he desires appears to be slipping out

of reach. Marriage becomes a means of entrapping and manipulating women, particularly poor

women or women of color, who, their wealthy white suitors believe, should expect nothing

better. Angela Murray’s disavowal of her family leads Fielding to regard her as a mistress, not a

wife; in Quicksand, Helga’s mixed race convinces Olsen of her depravity.

Believing his money and social status are ample prizes for a woman like Helga, Olsen

“makes explicit,” writes Cheryl Wall, “the connection between prostitution and marriage Larsen

had earlier implied [. . .] in Helga’s musings about marriage as a means to acquire things”

(“Passing for What?” 104). Repelled by him now, Helga tells Olsen that she is not for sale, and

particularly not for sale to a white man. She reacts against prejudiced notions of behavioral signs

of blood, such as Olsen’s image of her as an oddity rather than a human being with an identity of

her own.63 “He senses a tiger, an animal within her that he wants to possess—to ravish and to be

ravished—through marriage if necessary” (Huggins 158). It is his obsession with black blood,

not hers, that drives the two of them apart. Helga experiences a new surge of racial allegiance

yet despises the finished portrait, which she believes captures her as “some disgusting sensual

creature” (Q 119). Olsen “demonstrates most sharply the confluence of racism and sexism in

both the way he paints Helga and in the way he courts her” (Wall, Women 101). Like Angela

childish, and decadent. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth Edition, ed. M.H. Abrams (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993) 1759-1817. 63 Amritjit Singh believes that if “Helga could have seen herself as an individual rather than a human organism dominated alternately by black or white blood, she might have been reasonably happy with Axel Olsen.” As I explain, however, Olsen’s objectification and degradation of Helga would prohibit any so-called happiness. I also find troubling Singh’s statement that women need or deserve to be only “reasonably” happy. Singh 102. 153

Murray drawing Hetty Daniels, Olsen imbues his portrait of black womanhood with centuries of

sexual and color prejudice.64

Helga suspects the portrait reveals an unappealing truth about her nature, an underlying

corruption rooted in her race. She tries to articulate her feelings to her uncle, hinting at an

inexplicable, ingrained facet of herself, “something deep down inside” (Q 121) that causes her

distress. Her uncle, along with all of Copenhagen, finds Helga’s behavior ungrateful and

“insufficiently civilized” (Q 121), particularly her refusal of Olsen. Far removed from Harlem, she suffers the denigration similar to that of her Harlem Renaissance cohorts, also cast aside by whites when they no longer entertained them. 65 With the character of Helga, Larsen challenges

Anglo-European modernist notions of alienation, “for the representation of alienation as a state

of mind reduces history to an act of thought and leads to a political conservatism. If people

cannot change their conditions, only how they feel about them, [as Helga tries to do], they can

only legitimize and approve the status quo, and social criticism becomes irrelevant” (Carby 170).

Perceiving her aunt and uncle’s disappointment, tired of being ogled, and disillusioned by the

“exposure of Europe’s high culture as a ‘grand illusion’ ” (De Jongh 11), Helga longs to return to black Harlem.

Traveling Again

Returning to her friend Anne Grey, Helga declines to attend the wedding between her and

Robert Anderson, although she is in fact an unwitting reason for the couple’s marriage.

64 Olsen’s painting of Helga prefigures the triptych of African-American womanhood painted by a young male artist in Alice Childress’s play, Wine in the Wilderness. The triptych’s first figure is a larger-than-life African queen, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the African-American urban women of Bill’s milieu. His painting imposes identity upon young black women, as Olsen’s painting does upon Helga. 65 “That, of course, is the predicament of all patronized intellectuals—white and black,” writes Nathan Huggins. “When one ceases to amuse, one is out of luck. Sadly, all of Harlem—especially the entertainer, the artist, and the 154

Anderson, relocated to Harlem, marries Anne to suppress “that nameless and to him shameful impulse, that sheer delight, which ran through his nerves at mere proximity to Helga” (Q 124).

Sensing the electricity between them, Anne accepts Helga’s offer to leave her house and live in a

hotel, adopting a prudent philosophy on the nature of sex and sexual jealousy. The “more

lawless place” within him that Anderson desires to repress is one “where she herself never hoped

or desired to enter” (Q 124). Staving off Robert’s sexual decadence as well as her own sexuality

becomes Anne’s primary objective, demonstrating the “maiming impact of conventional

marriage [. . .] on women’s lives and possibilities” (Nelson 4). In the name of sexual propriety,

Anne cultivates a socially advantageous but emotionally bereft marriage, affirming Helga’s

suspicion that she may not have fully loved her first husband either.

Love alone cannot guarantee a successful marriage, however, as Helga concludes when

reflecting on her mother’s love for a black man and its lasting stigma upon them all. That her

mother’s link to a man of another race was enough to drive her into “poverty, sordidness, and

dissipation” (Q 56) in her white community reveals the extent of society’s horror of mixed-race

sexual relationships. Ashamed of her country, Helga is equally ashamed of herself for once

casting aspersions upon her mother’s character. Resigning from Naxos, she had argued with Dr.

Anderson, who contrived to keep her there by appealing to what he believed was her sense of her

own importance. “ ‘You’re a lady,’” he says to her. “ ‘You have dignity and breeding’” (Q

54)— reminding Helga of all the good her mother’s breeding and “older, more polished

civilization” had done for her (Q 54). Disgusted with the relentless yoking of a woman’s family

background with her respectability, she retorts to Anderson that she was born in a slum to

parents who may not have been married.

writer—was in some way, at one time or another, obliged to the white patron. The racial character of the relationship made it more damaging to the art and more galling to the artists” (127). 155

Helga’s parentage—as well as Nella Larsen’s—inverts African-American literature’s more frequent portrayals of black women’s entanglements with white males.66 In Jacobs’s

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harper’s Iola Leroy, and Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree and

Comedy: American Style, to name just a few, African-American women suffer the repercussions of bondage or marriage to white men. Even when loved and respected by their white partners, women of color experience unjust reversals of fortune whenever and however the relationship ends. In Quicksand, Larsen presents the suffering of white women, too, regardless of their partner’s race. Helga’s mother’s second marriage to a white man results not in security for her or her daughter but in horrific arguments about Helga, the offspring, like Larsen, of “that most- detested union in American society, a white mother and a black father” (Wall, Women 89).

Quicksand depicts the collapse of marriage beneath racist ideologies of womanhood, as

“stereotypes only appear to exist in isolation while actually depending on a nexus of figurations which can be explained only in relation to each other” (Carby 20). Thus the antebellum white woman can only be chaste and demure if the black slave woman is the opposite. “Proof” of the female slave’s depravity arose again and again—so white wives told themselves—in the plantation’s mulatto children whose faces replicated the master’s. As Hazel Carby explains, the institution of slavery depended for its continuance on men’s reproductive control over women, which “had entirely different consequences for white women and for black women” (24). White

66 Larsen’s mother was Danish and her father was black West Indian; they may or may not have been married. When Larsen’s father died or left and her mother married a white man, her new “white” family sent her to school in the South so she could live among her “own people.” A 1910 census form lists the Larsen household as having only one child, Anna, the white daughter of Larsen’s mother and stepfather, indicating to Larsen’s biographer, Thadious Davis, the family’s final eradication of Nella from their lives. An essay by George Hutchinson disputes Davis’s assumptions, however. He believes the infamous census form likely resulted from the census taker’s conversation with a border in the house who was unaware of Larsen’s existence, rather than from Marie Larsen’s “denial [. . .] of giving birth to Nella Larsen” (Hutchinson 333, Davis 47). Davis compounds Larsen’s rejection by her family in suggesting that her biological father, Peter Larson, may have passed and could have been the “white” Peter Larsen who sent Nella away. The Davis and Hutchinson texts provide an intriguing backdrop for the complexities of self- 156 women were deemed progenitors of the superior race, while black women produced not children but “property [. . .], capital itself in the form of slaves” (Carby 25). Slave women’s fears for their female children, destined for breeding and rape, are well documented. Harriet Jacobs despairs over her second child, a girl, while the escaped slave Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

(1987) murders her baby daughter rather than sacrifice her to a life of sexual torture, one of several “representations of death as agency that can be found” throughout African-American literature (Gilroy 63).67 Morrison based the climactic incident in Beloved on the true story of fugitive slave Margaret Garner, who killed her infant and tried to kill her other two children as her captors approached.

Larsen is among black women writers seeking to “rescue their [or their female characters’] bodies from a persistent association with illicit sexuality,” an association extending well into the twentieth century (Carby 32). Anne Grey marries to eradicate sexuality altogether.

Her disgust with Audrey Denney, a mulatta Harlem socialite, stems from Audrey’s apparently successful fusion of disparate worlds. Anne cannot bear the idea that black and white women and men might be intellectually, socially, or sexually compatible, and redirects her own sexuality in insinuations about others’. She resembles Helga’s former mentor, the race worker who, upon hearing of Helga’s interracial parentage, “felt that the story, dealing as it did with race intermingling and possibly adultery, was beyond definite discussion” (Q 72). Women in

Quicksand determine to resist their sexuality, playing into a particularly grievous stereotype that results in isolating, emotionally bereft marriages.

identification that form the basis of Larsen’s fiction. George Hutchinson, “Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race,” American Literary History, 9:2 (1997) 329-349. 67 Paul Gilroy also cites Frederick Douglass’s “preference for death” in his confrontation with slave breaker Edward Covey (Gilroy 63). “Douglass’s departure from the pacifism that had marked his early work,” Gilroy writes, “is directly relevant to his critical understanding of modernity. It underscored the complicity of civilisation and brutality while emphasising that the order of authority on which the slave plantation relied cannot be undone without 157

In Harlem once more, Helga disdains her former fantasies, believing now that marriage

merely portends the birth of more unwanted black offspring. Associating marriage with children and vowing to have neither, Helga does not sympathize with the sufferings of blacks so much as

locate an easy means of avoiding her sexuality. Her former fiancé views the issue differently.

To him, African Americans are obligated to reproduce and overcome the white majority by sheer numbers. He furthermore counts himself among the Talented Tenth, responsible for creating a

“better class” of families (Q 132). Unperturbed by Helga’s stance, he proposes marriage to her again. Turning away from Vayle, she runs headlong into Anne’s husband, Anderson. The reappearance of both men in Helga’s life, writes Cheryl Wall, demonstrates “that the expectations for women remain the same” regardless of place or time (Wall, Women 99). In

Europe or America, with black or white men, marriage looms as a dispiriting endgame for women.

Final Decisions

Anderson’s marriage fails to weaken his desire for Helga. Resisting him at first, Helga succumbs to her desire until drawing away in confusion. She slaps Anderson’s face and pretends disgust, but later that night, “riotous and colorful dreams invaded Helga Crane’s prim hotel bed”

(Q 133). In the morning, she decides to accept what she believes was his instigation of an affair.

Reflexively connecting marriage with children, she fails to consider that children may also result from a liaison outside marriage. She dwells instead on the “mental quagmire into which that kiss had thrown her” and resolves to explore “to the end that unfamiliar path into which she had strayed” (Q 134). Standing before a display of African art, she and Anderson decide to meet the

recourse to the counter-violence of the oppressed” (Gilroy 63). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 158

following evening—she to begin an affair, he to prevent one. Placing their momentous yet

disjointed conversation amid an array of African sculptures, Larsen conveys each character’s

confused sense of heritage and identity.

True to form, Anderson suppresses his desire for Helga, apologizing for his actions as the

result of too many cocktails. His rejection prompts her last ill-fated Harlem excursion.

Humiliated, she wanders the rainy streets of New York and takes shelter in a small church. With

her wet, clinging red dress and bare arms and neck, Helga again embodies, for those who gaze

upon her, the licentious—now repentant—black woman. Exhausted and overwhelmed, she wails

in what the churchgoers see as authentic religious conversion, as women “are allowed to express

their feelings only under the guise of religious fervor” (McLendon, “Self-Representation” 156).

Helga too connects sex and religion in targeting the Reverend Pleasant Green for seduction,

equating her ensuing sense of peace with the presence of the pious man in bed with her. She

wonders whether “it wasn’t religion that had made her feel so utterly different from dreadful

yesterday” (Q 144), and decides to marry Green so that guilt-free sexual and spiritual release

might always be hers. Green’s own “agitation and sincere conviction of sin” (Q 144) after

sleeping with Helga prompts his proposal of marriage. Bound together by guilt and fear, they

return to Alabama as husband and wife.

Helga’s descent into the South parallels the erosion of her identity. Initially she believes wife- and motherhood will provide the happiness denied her in Europe and Harlem. Occupied with her daily chores, her husband, and her children, she finds an “anesthetic satisfaction for her senses” (Q 146). She no longer views black children as future lynching victims. Now even the

“smallest, dirtiest brown child [. . .] was to her an emblem of the wonder of life, of love, and of

God’s goodness” (Q 149). Soon, however, she becomes uncomfortable in her new environment, 159

as the discontent she felt at Naxos resurfaces and prompts her to try to change the people around

her. She begins instructing neighboring women on how to decorate their homes and dress

themselves and their children. Of course she only breeds resentment in the women toward her

arrogant intrusion into their lives.68 By “doing things for poor women rather than with them and

voicing their concerns rather than allowing them to speak for themselves” (Cash 14), Helga

resembles clubwomen in their misguided efforts to Victorianize poor and working-class women.

At the end of her busy days, nights in bed with Green provide Helga with sexual pleasure, but result in three children within twenty months. Soon she suffers the psychological and physical tolls exacted by the rigors of agrarianism. Disgusted with her husband, bewildered by her children, appalled by her physical pain, she realizes that marriage and family have eradicated rather than provided a chance of achieving selfhood. After the life-threatening birth of her fourth child, she dwells on this irony in a lengthy psychic retreat from her world. With Helga suffering, perhaps dying in the South, Larsen refuses “to romanticize the unceasing toil and continuous childbearing that was the particular oppression of rural women” (Wall, Women 115). Marriage in Quicksand is a “site of confinement and oppression for women” resulting in “male domination, domestic drudgery, perpetual pregnancy, eternal motherhood, sexual violence, and even death,” particularly for rural women (duCille, Coupling Convention 144).69 Helga’s

realization comes too late; she is already trapped.

To see the “transformation of Helga from strong, independent, and charismatic world-

traveler to born-again, rural, baby-making drudge [as] abrupt if not incredible” (Gray 267) is to

68 Cash discusses at length northern clubwomen’s condescension toward southern women and their families. “Club leaders who had achieved upward mobility and a high status attempted to impose their cultural standards on their less-privileged sisters. They did not seem to realize [nor does Helga] that those black women who were poverty- ridden, overworked, and illiterate, could not meet the Victorian standards” (8). 69 Larsen’s successors are similarly unwilling to accept the South as the ultimate destination for African-American females. Gloria Naylor, Alice Childress, and Toni Morrison, among others, locate many of their stories in urban 160

misconstrue Quicksand. Throughout the novel, Helga’s veneer of independence is overwhelmed

by her recurring capitulation to prejudice. She resigns herself to marriage as the only route for

women and as penance for her sexual encounter with Green.70 She has no real choices, for her

position “both inside and outside the race issue” disables her quest for identity (Gray 258).

Slowly healing from childbirth, she makes nebulous plans to leave her husband and the South behind—but again becomes pregnant. The South is not wholly to blame for her demise, however, as Larsen illustrates in her next novel, Passing, in which repressive marriages exist among urban black couples as well.

Passing

Like Fauset’s Plum Bun, Larsen’s second novel examines the mechanics of passing—the

silence, presumption, and collusion of those involved as well as the racism that renders passing

desirable to begin with. Passing as white is often easily achieved without a word; sometimes it incites deadly rage in those deceived. Larsen’s women characters experience the complex pitfalls of passing. Clare Kendry, the daughter of a white father and African-American mother, leaves her black community at a young age, deciding to pass as white permanently and marrying a white man. Light-skinned Irene Redfield is a prominent Harlem socialite who occasionally passes for convenience.71 Her more permanent form of passing is maintaining a pretense of

marital bliss. For both women, marriage is the predominant factor affecting their racial,

psychological, and sexual lives. Clare can never openly retrieve her racial heritage because her

husband would divorce her if he knew of it. Longing simply for a stable, uneventful marriage,

settings to explore more viable opportunities for women. Morrison’s Tar Baby in particular depicts the devastation experienced by black women in the South. 70 McLendon, The Politics of Color 88, 91. 71 Gatewood notes that occasional passing met with more criticism than permanently “crossing over” (176). 161

Irene is terrified that her restless husband will one day leave her, and so tries to pin him down.

Living duplicitous lives, Clare and Irene illustrate the havoc wrought upon women’s

consciousness by the vagaries of marriage in black and white society.

For Clare and Irene, passing carries with it “an inherent tension, a feeling of threat,

because one’s identity depends on [mis]recognition by the other” (Sarup 13). The cataclysmic effects of misrecognition transpire when the women encounter each other one day in a posh

Chicago hotel. They have been moving freely, separately, through upscale Chicago because they are perceived to be white. Irene’s confidence in her ability to pass is shaken, however, when she notices a woman staring at her from across the room. Fearing for an instant that her secret is out, she abruptly dismisses the idea. “White people were so stupid about such things,” she thinks,

“for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means,

finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot” (Passing 178).

Certain that she, however, can discern a person’s race through external cues, Irene assumes the woman in question is white when in fact she is a mulatta, Clare Kendry, a girlhood friend she has not seen in years. Her misjudgment embarrasses her; she feels duped—which she is—and as the two women become reacquainted, Irene scarcely hides her distaste. She recalls the rumors that had circulated of Clare’s glamorous life after leaving the black world behind, and dissembles when Clare proclaims, “ ‘I’ll wager you’ve never given me a thought over the years’

” (P 182). Yet Irene’s scorn of Clare’s desertion of black Harlem stems more from the recklessness of the act than from any racial allegiance on Irene’s part. Incapable of taking action without prudently analyzing the possible consequences, Irene resents and envies Clare’s spontaneity and daring.72

72 Many aristocrats of color “appeared not only to be sympathetic toward those who chose to move into the white world but also to admire their courage in doing so” (Gatewood 176). 162

Clare suffers beneath her carefree façade, however, for while the misperceptive gaze of others enables her passing, it also nullifies her existence. She tells Irene of running into another old friend, Margaret Hammer, one day in Chicago. “ ‘I assure you that from the way she looked through me,’” Clare says, “ ‘even I was uncertain whether I was actually there in the flesh or not’” (P 183). The anecdote is no less devastating for the breezy manner in which Clare tells it, for she perceives the conflict between hiding her identity while simultaneously desiring its recognition. “Blackness” can only be denied if it is first acknowledged, accepted, and rejected.

Regardless of how successfully or silently each woman passes, she is able to do so because of, not despite, her African-American heritage.

Clare’s sense of seeing, being seen, and not being seen anticipates Ralph Ellison’s account of racially enforced invisibility. “I am a man of substance,” says the narrator of Invisible

Man. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. [. . .] That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of the inner eyes” (7). It is unclear whether Margaret

Hammer “does not see” Clare because she thinks she is looking at a white person, because she knows that Clare is passing and does not want to give her away, or because she recognizes Clare but resents her passing. Whatever the case may be, the incident presents the gaze in a racist society as strong enough, regardless of its inaccuracies, to affirm or withhold one’s identity.

That Irene and Clare stare at one another so intently indicates each woman’s desire to possess what the other seems to have. Clare presses Irene for gossip about black Harlem while Irene questions Clare about her life as a white woman.

163

Modes of Passing

Clare is amazed to learn that Irene never considers crossing the color line. Irene explains that she already has all she wants, “ ‘[e]xcept, perhaps, a little more money’” (P 190), indicating her vague but persistent feelings of discontent. She is not alone, as African-American families placed greater emphasis on wealth throughout the 1920s.73 With her physician husband, lovely home, and ample leisure time, Irene feels she should be happy, not realizing that substituting material wealth for personal fulfillment has led directly to her dissatisfaction. Clare in turn begins to disdain her affluence, desiring instead the excitement and warmth she sees in Harlem’s black community. Showing little interest in her husband or young daughter, she strives to renew her life in black Harlem and selects Irene as a means of doing so. As the two women become entangled in each other’s lives, American race, class, and gender biases converge to endanger their subjectivity, their families, and their marriages.

The complications of passing and marriage emerge at Clare Kendry’s Chicago home one afternoon, when Irene arrives and is surprised to see another old friend, Gertrude Martin. As the three women chat, Irene realizes that Gertrude and Clare have something in common: they are both married to white men, although with one key difference. While Gertrude also passes and lives in a white community, she and her husband were schoolmates together and so he knows of her background, whereas Clare’s husband, John Bellew, believes his wife is white. Married to a black man, a dark-complexioned one at that, Irene feels isolated, “outnumbered” with Gertrude and Clare, “not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well”

(P 195). When the conversation turns to more sensitive topics, she feels increasingly lost.

73 Such values arose in the face of the “rising tide of racism and the fading hopes for an integrated society, as well as the decline in the economic base of the old upper class” (Gatewood 335). 164

As the women discuss their husbands and children, a particularly ghastly aspect of racial

prejudice and passing emerges. Talking about her pregnancy, Clare states that she “ ‘nearly died

of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. [. . .]

The strain is simply too—too hellish” (P 197). Gertrude concurs, for while her husband and mother-in-law were unconcerned about the coming child’s color, she knew biracial babies often

“ ‘turn out dark no matter what color the father and mother are” (P 197). Unwilling to undergo such trauma again, Gertrude and Clare vow to have no more children. While they may prevent further pregnancies through celibacy, such is not the only form of effective birth control.74 It is likelier that Clare and Gertrude control their reproductive lives, just as they control revelations about their race, empowering themselves in their otherwise maladjusted marriages.75 Even

though Gertrude and her husband are open with each other, their marriage remains intact only if

those around them believe in their charade. The discovery of Gertrude’s race would undoubtedly

lead to her and her husband’s ruin.

Describing Clare and Gertrude’s tormented pregnancies, Larsen illustrates the complex relationship between marriage and skin color. Clare’s husband also connects the two, returning home during the tea party to greet his wife with a resounding, “Hello, Nig” (P 200). Bellew explains the nickname to a shocked Gertrude and Irene as stemming from Clare’s skin’s gradual and—to him—inexplicable darkening. Soon, Bellew says, “if she don’t look out she’ll wake up

74 I disagree with Merrill Horton, who believes the women in Passing are celibate, Clare and Gertrude because they fear having dark children, Irene because she follows their lead, believing in their insider’s knowledge of how refined white ladies behave. Merrill Horton, “Blackness, Betrayal, and Childhood: Race and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Passing, CLA Journal, 38 (1994) 31-45. 75 The first birth control clinic opened in Brooklyn, NY in 1916, with women activists encouraging mainly working- class women to exert control over their bodies. By the 1920s, with working-class women showing little enthusiasm for birth control, activists “began to gravitate toward the more receptive middle class.” Deborah G. Felder, A Century of Women: the Most Influential Events in Twentieth-Century Women’s History (Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane Press, 1999) 81. 165

one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger” (P 201). Stemming from fear, ignorance, and greed, Bellew’s racist invective grows in tandem with Chicago’s changing demographics.76

Fearing black encroachment on “his” territory, Bellew makes a point of openly expressing his bigotry. All three women play along with his diatribe— Clare and Gertrude because they must, Irene because her rage is held in check by a sudden feeling of loyalty to

Clare. Many African Americans sympathized with and protected those who passed permanently, mindful of the daily degradations compelling them to do so.77 Painful though it may be, Irene

similarly protects Clare; to do otherwise would betray African Americans’ subversion of racism.

The character of Alex Bates in Fauset’s Comedy: American Style also views passing and those

who pass with a “combination of cooperation and resentment” (Comedy 92). Although

heartbroken, even Jinny in Plum Bun goes along with Angela’s masquerade. Such actions do not necessarily condone passing, but illustrate a fundamental understanding of the choices made by

African Americans in maneuvering a racist society.

Passing into Fear

Irene’s vacillating thoughts on her marriage, Clare, and Clare’s passing reveal the tumult

beneath her calm exterior. Finding a letter from Clare in the mail as the novel begins, she recalls

her as a little girl, as a teenager, at the death of her father, and all the years in between. After reading the letter, she remembers their fateful meeting in Chicago and the humiliating encounter with Bellew—a multitude of memories occurring in seconds, spurred by recognizing Clare’s

76 The city’s African-American population “numbered 14,171 in 1890; it more than doubled by the end of the decade and increased to 109,458 by 1920” (Gatewood 122). Although “as late as 1910 in Chicago, African Americans were less segregated from native-born Whites than Italian-Americans were [. . .] by 1910 the isolation index had risen to 15.1 percent; by 1920 it had more than doubled at 38.1 percent” (Anna Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women’s Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago [New York and London: New York University Press, 1996] 32). 77 Gatewood 175-6. 166

handwriting on an envelope.78 Setting the letter aside, she is surprised to find her anger so

“strong and unabated, across the stretch of two years’ time” (P 211). She is disgusted with

herself for having guarded Clare’s secret when Clare herself, passing as white, has no real regard

for African Americans herself. For Clare, the escapade of passing began when she was a

teenager and never stopped. For both her and Irene, marriage remains the greatest impetus for

the various types of passing in which they engage.

Clare passes and marries a wealthy white man to attain the privileges of a white upper-

middle-class woman. Yet with her husband often away on business and her daughter at boarding

school, she is left with a materially luxurious but emotionally bereft existence, prompting her

resolve to return to an African-American community. While Irene’s husband Brian is not surprised, attributing Clare’s impulse to the “instinct of the race to survive and expand” (P 216),

her actions in fact contradict historical precedent. Thadious Davis states that while “the passing

character in fiction [often] returns to the black race in the end [. . .], in real life, African

Americans who crossed the color line most often did not return” (182). Frantz Fanon also declares that the mulatto “wants not only to turn white but also to avoid slipping back” (54).

Clare’s second letter to Irene, however, expresses her isolation among whites and unbearable marriage to a bigot, despite Irene’s reminder to Clare that she selected Bellew as the best means of obtaining her goals. Like Irene, however, Clare “had shut away reason as well as caution” where her husband and marriage were concerned (P 231). She longs to live among African

Americans again and escape the “unsynthesized dialectics” of disparate worlds (De Koven 4).

Those who cross the color line eventually return, Brian tells Irene, who rejects such

78 Erich Auerbach explains modern writers’ use of common, seemingly unimportant exterior events [such as Clare’s handwriting on an envelope] to release important psychological aspects of their characters and reflect the omnitemporality of human consciousness. Erich Auerbach, “The Brown Stocking,” Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) 525-553. 167

generalizations yet may herself subconsciously bear them out, having chosen dark-skinned

Redfield as her husband.

Lamenting her own dark skin, Emma Lou in Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry wonders

why her color-conscious mother married a black man instead of “some eligible brown-skinned”

suitor (21). Olivia Cary in Fauset’s Comedy: American Style curses her dark-complexioned

parents for having “made” her colored (Comedy 4). As Fanon asks, “What indeed could be more

illogical than a mulatto woman’s acceptance of a Negro husband? For it must be understood

once and for all that it is a question of saving the race” (54-55). Professing pride in her dark

husband and sons, actively involved in Harlem’s social scene, Irene rarely stops to consider her race loyalty. Indeed, “what is powerful and unexpected is the sympathy which Larsen shows not for Irene, who remains true to her racial origins except for brief excursions, but for Clare, who betrays them” (Conde 103). Throughout the novel, Irene is the one adhering to white values at the expense of African Americans.

Irene frequently passes and harbors typically white aspirations: attaining money and

social status through a husband and projecting the persona of a chaste, demure wife. Her social

activities in particular reflect a conflict among African-American clubwomen at the time.79 As in any large-scale operation comprised of thousands of people, opinions differed among the clubwomen’s beliefs, methods, and goals. Along with assisting migrant girls and women, clubwomen sought to counter pernicious stereotypes of black women as sexually and morally loose,80 in part by drawing Victorian ideals of womanhood into their endeavors. Teaching

79 Numerous clubwomen “married men who were prominent in their own professions, therefore, they had the time and economic security to do philanthropic work” (Cash 30). 80 Clubwomen “were especially concerned with defending their names against charges of immorality and sexual promiscuity [. . .] in defending black women’s moral integrity and sexual purity, clubwomen [. . .] denied sexual agency” (Cash 136). Throughout the early twentieth century, in fact, the NACW “denounced female individuality and any expression of sexuality, while it supported the idea of femininity” (Cash 140). 168

proper etiquette to young women therefore became as important as feeding the hungry,

particularly since the majority of clubwomen belonged to the middle class.81 Apart from

aristocrats of color,82 in fact, most African Americans had no “class” to inherit. Instead they constructed one upon the very models that subjugated them.

Rather than social reform, Irene is more inclined toward organizing parties, teas, and dances with women of her social standing.83 Far worse, she objectifies other African Americans,

particularly her maid, Zulena, described by Irene as a “small mahogany-coloured creature” (P

215, emphasis added). While Jessie Fauset’s fiction has few black domestics in order to

advocate better opportunities for women, Larsen creates Irene’s maid and Sadie, her cook, to

illustrate black women’s oppression of other black women. Zulena roves fearfully through the

Redfields’ home, approaching Irene tentatively and speaking to her quietly, accustomed to being scolded for disturbing her mistress.84 The “hegemonic control of dominant classes has been

secured at the expense of sisterhood” in Irene’s life (Carby 18).85 She is even appalled by

Clare’s conversations with Zulena and Sadie, believing that wealthy, beautiful (white?) women

demean themselves by associating with (black) servants. Her confidence in how to run a

dignified home is shaken by Clare’s friendliness toward the domestics.

Irene’s convoluted notions of womanhood emerge further in sexually stereotyping

African-American and white women. She assumes Clare is white when she sees her at the hotel

not only because of her looks but also because of her flirtatious behavior with a waiter, inverting

81 “Black women’s clubs were led by middle-class women at both the national and local levels. Only in areas where there were no college-educated black women would working-class women compose the rank and file of the club members” (Cash 6). 82 I take the term from Willard B. Gatewood’s Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). 83 See Gatewood 191. 84 Gatewood explains that a “common complaint by aristocrats of color was that they could not secure black servants, and if they did, the blacks refused to show proper deference to their employers” (196). 169 stereotype in this instance, as such traits are usually imposed upon black women by whites.

After becoming reacquainted with Clare, however, she reverts to traditional false race and class paradigms. She is scornful of Clare’s passing, envies her wealth, and links African-American and working-class women with sexual depravity. The expensive restaurants in which Clare had been seen, the limousines, the chauffeurs, the elegant clothes had all led Irene and her friends to conclude that Clare was a mistress kept by a white man, or men. It was inevitable, they thought, for someone like her, raised in a blue-collar, mixed-race family. The same aspersions are cast upon the women in the novels of Jean Rhys. Similarly outfitted, wined, and dined, they signal to mainstream society the sexual depravity of alienated women.

Irene insults Clare again when she tries to dissuade her from attending the Negro Welfare

League dance, saying that if she shows up alone, she will be mistaken for a prostitute. Obsessed with Clare’s beauty and her own disintegrating marriage, she soon suspects Clare and her husband of having an affair. Once horrified by Belew’s racist invective, she exploits it now, certain that she can rid herself of Clare not by telling Bellew that Clare is black but by apprising him of her visits to black Harlem. As Llewellyn Nash in Comedy: American Style says to Phebe, whom he yet believes is white, “ ‘What I want to know is why should you be so prudish with me

. . . a girl who runs around with niggers!’” (Comedy 122) At least one critic also sees Clare’s forays into black Harlem as evidence of “increasingly reckless sexual flings” (De Jongh 31) given that “[f]emale sexuality in the 1920s was problematic because the ‘primitive’ instinct within the female could result in sexual deviation” (De Souza 66). Irene contends with fears of underlying primitivism within herself by projecting them onto Clare.

85 Contemporary writers also address this issue, such as Toni Morrison in Tar Baby, in which the mulatta protagonist, Jadine Childs, associates black women with servitude and degradation. 170

The Redfields

With their separate bedrooms, terse exchanges, and incompatible values, Irene and Brian

Redfield live joylessly together. Irene clings to the marriage “not out of any deep love for her husband Brian, but because it is her source of security and permanence” (Wall, “Passing for

What?” 108). She therefore prevents him from achieving his dream of taking his family out of the United States, away from prejudice, and settling in Brazil. She insists on raising their two sons in New York, going to great lengths to shield them from prejudice,86 scolding Brian for discussing racism with them, although their arguments only widen the chasm between them.

“Was she never to be free of it,” she wonders, “that fear which crouched, always, deep down within her, stealing away the sense of security, the feeling of permanence [. . .]. that strange, and to her fantastic, notion of Brian’s of going off to Brazil” (P 217). Irene works tirelessly to thwart

Brian’s ambitions, for they portend the disruption of an otherwise outwardly steady routine.

Their marriage is no meeting of the minds, no promise of security or stability, but a fragile union that Brian might easily destroy at any moment.

Another volatile issue between Brian and Irene is their sex life, or lack thereof. In one instance, Irene expresses concern over their son’s schoolyard sex education, although she cannot even bring herself to say the word “sex” aloud.87 Irene’s “buried, long-denied sexual self”

(duCille, Coupling Convention 214) drives Brian to say venomously that sex is “a grand joke, the greatest in the world” (P 220). Such a comment would ordinarily devastate a wife, yet Irene, perhaps used to such words, betrays no emotion, only reproaches herself later for broaching the subject so clumsily. Rather than have a meaningful discussion or air-clearing argument with her

86 Middle and upper-middle class African-American parents at the time “expended extraordinary effort in shielding them [their children] from exposure to racial prejudice and in providing them with the best possible education” (Gatewood 190). 87 duCille, Coupling Convention 105. 171

husband, she placates him with silence, a tactic that is undoubtedly a significant source of their

problems. With a married couple at odds on how to raise their children, unable to talk without

denigrating each other, preferring silence to communication, Larsen overturns her literary

predecessors’ portrayals of marriage as a liberating force between the sexes and a strengthening

agent within African-American communities.

Instead marriage portends psychological, emotional, even physical devastation for women of color, as Clare is killed and Irene falls unconscious as Passing concludes—another falling death in the midst of a party, another woman left psychologically incapacitated. The women’s color prejudice and social climbing pit them against each other, when “few, if any, women in the literature of black women succeed in heroic quests without the support of other women or men in their communities” (Washington xxi). Larsen’s heroines fail not only because they are subjected to sexism and racism, but also because they lack the trust and constancy of other women, or othermothers, Patricia Hill Collins’s term for members of a nurturing female

African-American community. If her literary predecessors envision marriage as a means of linking women, families, and communities, Larsen believes external pressures prohibit African-

American women’s selfhood. Clare either abandons black women by passing as white or manipulates them to get what she wants. Irene lives and socializes with African Americans yet avoids forging meaningful relationships with them, focusing instead on their clothing or weight or suspecting them as rivals for her husband. Thwarted female relationships also lead to poor mothering in Passing, with Irene perplexed by her sons and Clare and Gertrude concerned mainly with their children’s coloring.

Focusing upon marriage, Fauset and Larsen depict the problems African-American

women face in establishing their subjectivity. In Plum Bun, Fauset investigates the prejudice 172 that forces black women to defer their dreams, waste their talents, and finally learn to acquire the sense of self and community needed to survive. Larsen’s women, in turn, become so lost amid racist white environs or their own dysfunctional homes, they fail to imagine themselves independent of men or marriage. Plum Bun suggests women might find their identity in spite, not because of impending marriages. Larsen’s novels exhibit a bleaker stance, with marriages based not on love and companionship but distrust, fear, and betrayal. Resisting pat endings,

Fauset and Larsen portray the ongoing complications for women amid the hierarchies of black and white society. 173

Chapter Four: Modified Female Identity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee

In her last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, Zora Neale Hurston examines the prejudices within white rural environs. Tracing the tempestuous marriage of a white Florida couple, the novel begins with Jim Meserve’s rape of the woman he is courting, Arvay Henson.

The rape is the defining moment of Arvay’s life, a recurring event in her marriage, and the novel’s prevailing image, illustrating Hurston’s views on gender and race relations in the mid- twentieth-century, a politically active period in her life. Published in 1948, Seraph on the

Suwanee taps into white America’s fear and ignorance of women, sexuality, and race, compelling women to modify their identity throughout their lives.

Seraph on the Suwanee is Hurston’s least-known, most under-appreciated work, viewed by many critics as her desertion of African-American themes and capitulation to white publishers.1 Hardly a paean to white values, the novel contains unattractive, morally bankrupt whites, many of whom live in filthy, rat- and roach-infested homes. In addition, Seraph reflects

1 As Janet St. Clair reports, the novel has “few friends among critics [. . .]. The entire work, it is commonly conceded, is riddled with weaknesses, inconsistencies, and authorial capitulation and cowardice” (38-9). In Women of the Harlem Renaissance, Cheryl Wall simply states, “the novel Seraph on the Suwanee, was published in 1948” (198). In another essay, “Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words,” Wall views Seraph as supporting the status quo of the 1940s (95). Claudia Tate says “the novel is generally understood by black literary scholars as a contrivance in Hurston’s canon and in African-American literary scholarship” (380). Delia Caparoso Konzett says it is “[d]ismissed by many critics as a failure and a classic example of a minority author pandering to white mainstream concerns” (133). Susan Edward Meisenhelder concurs: Seraph “is often read as evidence of [Hurston’s] growing conservatism or ambivalence about race and gender” (92). In a similar vein, Chuck Jackson says, “Among the critics’ anxieties are the fact that Arvay is not a ‘feminist’ heroine (or even likable), the text’s complicated and problematic treatment of rape, Hurston’s conscious prioritization of white characters and the oftentimes stagnant narrative which accompanies Arvay’s psychic turmoil” (639). Barbara Smith states that “in her last novel [. . .], Hurston appears to have abandoned her passionate advocacy of equality in marriage. Indeed she does not seem deeply involved with the novel at all” (29). Ann duCille notes that Seraph “remains obscure, dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ even by those who hail Hurston as their great literary foremother” (Coupling Convention 4). In “Lines of Descent/Dissenting Lines,” Deborah E. McDowell says succinctly, in Seraph, “Hurston’s feminist bite seems toothless” (233). Alice Walker calls Seraph Hurston’s “worst novel. [. . .] All of the main characters are white, and, apparently, Zora wrote this strange book to prove that she was capable of writing about white people.” It is, she says, “an awkward and contrived novel, as vacuous as a soap opera” (Hurston Reader 20-21). In Zora Neale 174

concerns found throughout Hurston’s oeuvre, such as how marriage threatens women’s selfhood,

sexual violence as a tool of oppression, and the connection between misogyny and racism,

including white women’s exploitation of patriarchal constructs at black women’s expense. The

novel also demonstrates Hurston’s refusal to see the races as homogeneous masses, preferring

instead to investigate the mores and motives of individuals.2 Often at loggerheads with her

contemporaries over the causes and cures of racism, Hurston creates characters in Seraph

encompassing her complex views. As Hazel Carby notes, “In many ways Seraph on the

Suwanee was Hurston’s most ambitious and most experimental novel to date” (Seraph xiv).

Jim and Arvay Meserve are turn-of-the-century “crackers” whose ascendancy on the socioeconomic ladder stems directly from African-American labor.3 Beneath the veneer of

friendliness toward their African-American workers lie bigoted tenets enacted within their own

dysfunctional marriage, in which Jim provides financially for Arvay yet lays siege to her through

intimidation and abuse. Filtered primarily through Arvay’s consciousness, the narrative

demonstrates the limited agency of women raised to believe in their inferiority to men. Arvay’s

intermittent, frantic attempts at self-assertion culminate in her “yessing” Jim as the novel

concludes4—stroking his ego, agreeing with all he says, uncomplainingly abiding his moodiness

and condescension.

Hurston: A Literary Biography, Robert Hemenway says, “the novel has little plot” (309) and is “an unsuccessful work of art” (314). 2 In Zora Neale Hurston (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), Lillie P. Howard states, “It is true that all of the major characters [in Seraph] are white, but, as in her other novels, Hurston simply seems to be writing about people, about individuals coming to terms with themselves, regardless of their color” (147). Deborah G. Plant agrees, stating, “Hurston perceived the individual, not the group, as the basic social and political unit and the point of origin for sociopolitical change.” Deborah G. Plant, Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995) 33. 3 Tate, “Straight Lick” 388. 4 I adapt the word “yessing” from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the protagonist explains how his grandfather’s deathbed advice to his father, later passed down to him, has haunted him all his life. “ ‘Live with your head in the lion’s mouth,’ ” his grandfather had said. “ ‘I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.’ “ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Signet, 1952) 19-20. 175

Often misconstrued as subservience, Arvay’s actions illustrate her newfound sense of

self-preservation, as well as a bit of the trickster at play, seemingly acquiescent in attaining what

she wants. To be sure, Arvay Meserve is no feminist prototype. She is often dour to the extent

that even Hurston disliked her company at times.5 She leaves a horrific marriage only to return, eager to cook, clean, and assure her husband of her sexual availability. Yet from page one,

Hurston explains how a woman like Arvay comes to exist. Alternately belittled and ignored as a

child, arousing interest in others only through histrionics, raped by her fiancé the day of her

wedding, Arvay enters her marriage and adulthood with only fragments of an identity she must

somehow make whole on her own.

Hurston in Florida

The novel opens in Sawley, Florida, on the Suwanee River, with Reconstruction “little more than a generation behind” (Seraph 2). At age twenty-one, Arvay Henson is considered an old maid, a burden to her parents, and is the topic of much town gossip and joking. For five years she has been preparing to become a missionary, an acceptable means of suppressing her emotions, her conviction that she will never marry, although her looks—her slimness, her blue eyes and blonde hair—arouse desire in the men around her. When Jim Meserve comes to town, full of bravado and schemes to make a name for himself, he spots Arvay, decides her piety is a pose, and determines to possess her. Wary at first, believing Jim is making fun of her (a prescient sentiment), Arvay nevertheless anticipates with pleasure a marriage that will free her from Sawley and her family.

5 In a letter of October 2, 1947, to her editor at Scribner’s, Burroughs Mitchell, Hurston writes, “I shall bring Arvay along her road to find herself a great deal faster. I get sick of her at times myself” (Letters 557). 176

Hurston describes the Hensons’ home in grim detail, portraying the living conditions of

families in bondage to the state’s turpentine camps. The house is a “rusty, splotchy gray-brown.

Only one room [. . .] was ceilinged overhead,” and the outhouse stands just beyond the kitchen

(Seraph 9). The town’s “ignorance, poverty, and the ever-present hookworm” (Seraph 1) are just a few of the ills witnessed by Hurston during her tenure with the Florida Federal Writers’

Project —a branch of the Work Projects Administration—in 1938-39. 6 Part of Franklin

Roosevelt’s New Deal, the FWP employed hundreds of writers unable to find work elsewhere at

the time. The equivalent of going on relief, joining the FWP was embarrassing for a renowned

author and anthropologist like Hurston.7 Yet she was not alone; Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow were among many writers who availed themselves of the FWP’s low but living wages.

Hurston spent much of her time in the FWP in the turpentine camps of northwestern

Florida. By the late 1930s, writes Pamela Bordelon, “Thousands of Floridians lived and worked in the remote piney woods, without running water or any trappings of modern life. Most of these turpentiners and their families were uneducated [. . .] Most of them worked under the worst labor conditions in the state, including peonage” (39). White overseers regularly beat their black male workers and indulged in routine sexual assaults against black women. “If the woman’s husband dared to protest, he was murdered and his body weighted with cement and thrown into the nearby Gulf of Mexico” (Bordelon 43). Profoundly disturbed by such conditions, Hurston was

6 For further information on Hurston’s FWP experiences, see Pamela Bordelon, ed., Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003); and John Lowe, Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 7 Bordelon writes, “The humiliation of ‘going on the WPA’ for middle-class persons like Hurston cannot be overemphasized” (14). Carla Kaplan believes the issue was not Hurston’s going on the WPA as much as the racist treatment she received once there. An accomplished writer, she was nevertheless brought on as a “ ‘junior 177 powerless to alleviate them without exacerbating the victims’ troubles or bringing them on herself. She did, however, bring her knowledge to Seraph on the Suwanee. “Indeed, the connection between Hurston’s FWP experiences and Seraph is so complete that one can find passages where Hurston lifted sentences from her FWP field notes and placed them in the mouths of her novel’s characters” (Bordelon x). The violence against Arvay occurs within the household of one such overseer, for Jim Meserve’s first point of business is ingratiating himself in Sawley’s turpentine camp.

Seizing Arvay

His second goal is claiming Arvay Henson. Given her background, Arvay stands no chance against the self-assured Jim, for Sawley has always been “eager to be amused at Arvay’s expense [. . .]. They had no way of knowing that Arvay was timid from feeling unsafe inside.

[. . .] They did not suspect that the general preference for Larraine, Arvay’s more robust and aggressive sister, had done something to Arvay’s soul across the years” (Seraph 9).8 From the day Jim arrives to escort Arvay to church, the psychological and physical imbalance between them is clear. Arvay has no wish to associate with Jim, yet when she tries to flee, “she felt her elbow being caught by a man’s long and strong fingers” (Seraph 15), as Jim grabs her and pulls her back. The following moments illustrate Jim’s determination to take what he wants by force.

To and from church, he “seized her by the shoulders” (16), “chuckled and squeezed Arvay’s arm lightly” (17), “held Arvay’s arm so that she could not advance” (19), and “detained her by

interviewer,’ which paid $67.20 a month, $5.00 less per month than the unit’s typist” (Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2002) 179. 8 My reading differs from that of Karla Holloway, who believes Hurston gives a “sarcastic and ironic tone” to Seraph’s narrator that “admonishes the reader not to take Arvay Henson seriously as it unsympathetically and nearly derisively describes her peculiarities and quirks.” Karla F.C. Holloway, The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston (New York, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987) 57. 178

holding her arm” (25). He then reveals his equally oppressive stance toward women’s minds. “

‘Women folks don’t have no mind to make up nohow,” he says. “Lady folks were just made to

laugh and act loving and kind and have a good man to do for them all he’s able” (25). From the

moment Jim and Arvay meet, he asserts his dominance.

Inside the Henson house, his physical aggression increases, but not before he notices a

family photograph. Arvay’s mother, Maria, is seated with “a fat blob that must be Arvay on her

lap, while another disfigurement that had to mean Larraine in a highly ruffled dress, leaned

against her knee” (Seraph 30). Jim asks Arvay about the picture, one of many in the novel

undermining patriarchal fantasies of white women and men.9 When she begins to speak about it,

however, he feigns an interest he does not feel, portending his dismissal of Arvay’s thoughts and words throughout their marriage. She, feeling pressured and uncomfortable in Jim’s presence, not to mention at her parents’ collusion with his plans, retreats into one of her “trances,” a rigid posture she believes expresses religious fervor; Jim calls it a “spasm” (Seraph 31). Taking a bottle of turpentine from Mrs. Henson, Jim stands above Arvay and lets a drop fall in her eye.

As Arvay jumps up, screams, and runs for water to flush out her eye, Jim and Mr. Henson “stood face to face and looked each other dead in the eye for a long moment,” Jim with “a dry grin smothering in his face” (Seraph 32-33).

A similar incident occurs in “Turpentine Love,” the second of thirteen vignettes in

Hurston’s Eatonville Anthology (1926). The story recalls an early encounter between an old and

happily married couple. While a young man, Jim Merchant visits his soon-to-be-wife, who, like

Arvay, is subject to “fits.” Unlike Jim Meserve, however, Merchant is unperturbed by the

9 Larraine’s husband, Carl Middleton, for instance, is a lazy, deceitful minister, in stark contrast to the inspired and inspirational African-American ministers in Hurston’s novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine and in her essay, “The Sanctified Church.” Seraph’s banker, Bradford Cary, embodies the slick, corrupt white southern politician, exploiting his town’s lower-class citizens to propel his career. 179

spasms. Furthermore, it is the woman’s mother, not he, who accidentally spills turpentine into

the woman’s eye and cures her. Hurston’s brief tale of marital love and female agency becomes,

decades later in Seraph, one of conspiratorial male violence. When Jim and Arvay finally talk

peaceably, under the mulberry tree that was Arvay’s childhood refuge from misery, she agrees to

marry him provided he pledges “not to drop no more teppentime in my eye” (Seraph 40). Jim

agrees, oblivious to Arvay’s underlying, graver request: that from now on, he no longer brutalize

her to get his way.

Arvay exacts a false promise from Jim, for their next encounter is far more violent.

Sensing her reticence, Jim seeks advice from one of his black turpentiners, Joe Kelsey, whose

industriousness and sense of humor have earned him Jim’s trust. When Jim confesses his fear of

losing Arvay, Joe counsels, “ ‘Most women folks will love you plenty if you take and see to it

that they do. Make ‘em knuckle under. [. . .] They’s all alike, Boss. Take ‘em and break ‘em’ ”

(Seraph 46). Joe may be speaking metaphorically, as the novel provides no evidence that he

beats his own wife, Dessie. Regardless, Jim takes him literally; like slave masters before him, he

conflates women with property and believes sexual violence to be the best method of control.10

“Rape was a weapon of domination” during slavery, writes Angela Davis, “a weapon of repression whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist” (23-4). Jim adapts the same logic regarding Arvay. The next day, nattily dressed for his wedding, he approaches her house to rape her.

10 Hurston thereby inverts the image of the stereotypical black male rapist. While Joe’s advice is abhorrent, it is Jim who conceptualizes it as rape. As Ann duCille notes, “The use of white characters in Seraph on the Suwanee makes it possible for Hurston to deal with misogynistic attitudes and the issue of sexual violence in courtship and marriage without directly assigning to black the politically and racially charged label of rapist” (Coupling Convention 127). Toni Morrison similarly destabilizes stereotype in Tar Baby, with light-skinned Jadine Childs fearing that the dark Son Green wants to rape her. Morrison further complicates matters, however, when Green does in fact sexually assault Jadine later in the novel. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Penguin, 1981). 180

Rape as Cataclysm

Hurston’s language is unequivocal, describing Arvay being led underneath the mulberry

tree, grabbed from behind, and forced to the ground, her clothing torn and her screams stifled by

Jim’s gritting teeth and smothering mouth. With swift, premeditated actions, Jim decimates

Arvay’s psyche, abuses her body, and desecrates the one place that ever gave her solace. She

had taken him there the preceding day for a “cleansing of her sacred place” so that she, too, might feel “clean and worthy” (Seraph 37). Instead, he defiles the space. “Not until Jim lay

limp and motionless upon her body, did Arvay return to herself and begin to think, and with thinking, all her old feelings of defeat and inadequacy came back on her. She was terribly afraid.

She had been taken for a fool, and now her condition was worse than before” (Seraph 51).

Hurston writes a poignant account of a woman’s destroyed sense of self after being raped.

The scene’s complexity, however, leads some critics to question whether a rape has even

occurred, for “despite her struggles, Arvay knew a pain remorseless sweet” (Seraph 51). Even

more problematic, Arvay reaches for Jim moments later, eager to make love as if he has done her

a favor and awakened her repressed sexuality. Hurston thus seems to present rape as “harmless

and natural” (Plant 169), or worse, “depicts it as motivated by love” (Konzett, Ethnic

Modernisms 116). The rape scene is perceived as melodramatic, “nearly unbelievable, soap-

opera-like,” with Arvay the Sleeping Beauty figure of a “typical romance” aroused by Jim’s

“probing of her body” (Campbell 144). Although “chilling,” the rape is “laced with comic

touches, such as Arvay’s torn underpants flying like a flag from a branch in the tree” (Campbell

140-1). Readers of Seraph are cautioned against a rush to judgment. “We must keep in mind the

details of the scene,” writes John Lowe, “and the fact that Arvay calls it rape only after she

decides Jim will think her cheap and abandon her if he thinks he has satisfied her desire” (283). 181

Additionally, Arvay’s “first thought [. . .] is not that she has been raped, but rather ‘taken for a

fool’” (Lowe 282). “She believes the rape was mainly to make fun of her!” (Campbell 121) Yet

viewing Arvay’s response as incommensurate with “real” rape both trivializes and pinpoints her

understanding of what has happened.

In Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), Susan Brownmiller explains,

“When a woman survives the physical trauma of rape, her emotional reaction may take many forms. She may cry, scream or tremble; she may be rigidly composed; she may smile inappropriately or tell the story with bursts of laughter” (404). Rather than being far-fetched,

Arvay’s instantaneous sense of being made a fool of demonstrates rape’s primary purpose as “to humiliate and degrade” (Brownmiller 424). Her subsequent embrace of Jim reveals her incapacity to protect herself or believe in her right to resist.11 Later, with Jim staring at her,

Arvay tries to compose herself and dress, yet her underwear is too torn to put on, so she hangs it

from a dead branch. This is no joke, but symbolic of her upcoming marriage.

Much of Arvay’s clothing is destroyed during the rape. Struggling with Jim, she hears

her buttons pop and fabric tear, explicating another aspect of Brownmiller’s study. Outlining the

inequities between men and women throughout history, Brownmiller discusses how a man’s

“clothing gives him maximum mobility” while a woman’s “hampers free movement by design,

and fragile materials add to her vulnerability. One yank and her blouse is ripped. One stumble

and her stockings are torn. Her skirt allows for easy access. One gesture, one motion and she is

humiliatingly exposed” (403). Hurston’s imagery, then, leaves no doubt as to the nature of Jim’s

attack.12 Before going back to the house, he “picked a dead leaf and bits of trash out of the back

11 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975) 450-51. 12 Ann duCille writes, “The fact that the [rape] scene climaxes in a ‘pain remorseless sweet’ [. . .] should not mask the degree of terror the rape inspires in Arvay or mitigate the impact that the violence of this assault has on the Meserve-Henson coupling. The rape confirms Arvay’s fears that Jim’s ardent courtship and marriage proposal are 182 of her head” (Seraph 53). Claiming to love Arvay even more than before, he asserts his preference for women devoid of self-esteem.

So begins the marriage of Jim and Arvay, with the two eloping even as Arvay accuses

Jim of rape. “Sure you was raped,” Jim says, “and that ain’t all. You’re going to keep on getting raped [. . .] every day for the rest of your life” (Seraph 57), a statement so revolting, many readers fail to take it seriously.13 Complicating matters is the novel’s portrayal of Jim as a devoted family man and hard worker, quick to laugh and joke, eager to give Arvay anything she wants. She, meanwhile, is often morose, critical, and uninterested in the source of her home’s increasingly lavish furnishings. In the contrasting characters of Arvay and Jim, Hurston demonstrates the effects on marriage of sexism.

Ongoing Oppression

With his good looks, sense of humor, and ambition, Jim Meserve is an all-American man—precisely the problem. That the novel often appears to side with him against Arvay is testament to Hurston’s effective use of irony and her appreciation of the power of money.14

really part of a grand joke designed to bring her low.” The event is no seduction, and is by no means mutual, duCille reminds. “The word that Hurston uses, that Arvay uses, that Jim himself uses repeatedly is rape,” yet even feminist critics prefer to say “seduction” or “lusty chauvinism” (Coupling Convention 126). 13 Lowe writes, “Jim’s language contains a good deal of bluster that must be discounted if we are to really understand the man within” (275). He finds Jim’s tough-talk a mask for underlying emotions that patriarchal society does not allow him to express. Marianna Torgovnick’s discussion of Joseph Conrad, in her study of modernism and primitivism, also relates to pervasive impressions of Jim Meserve. “Conrad provides additional testimony to the attraction violence exerts for many men in our culture,” Torgovnick writes, “perhaps as an outlet for the many alternative values conventionally barred to them: free emotional expression, openness to the ‘feminine’ views of mothers and wives, identification with other men on a basis other than competition.” Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellect, Modern Lives (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990) 151. Josie Campbell says Jim Meserve is “basically insecure as a man and thus constantly feels the need to assert his manhood [. . .]. [U]nderneath the macho bravado is the little boy fleeing to the arms of his mother.” Josie Campbell, Student Companion to Zora Neale Hurston (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001) 136. 14 St. Clair 43, 47. Additionally, Wall says, “Hurston endows Jim Meserve with a mixture of the attractive qualities found in Joe Starks and Tea Cake” (“Zora Neale Hurston” 95). Plant sees Jim as an archetypal Hurston male character, “the ideal blending of the industrious, self-made man and the hedonist: independent and individualistic but public-spirited, responsible but visionary, and compassionate but forceful. [. . .] The qualities these men possess, 183

Men’s economic success should never excuse their abuse of women, yet within capitalism, it does. Tracing the Meserves’ marriage, Hurston deconstructs problems unique to early twentieth- century patriarchy, “the central and overlapping roles that race, class, and gender play in the production and representation of the New South” (Konzett, “Getting in Touch” 132). Seraph’s milieu resonates with W.E.B. Du Bois’s account of the decades following the Civil War, in which racial prejudice among southern whites “strengthened [. . .] and crystallized [. . .] while the marvellous [sic] pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons of the freedmen” (78). African

Americans and whites suffered extreme poverty as the South began to industrialize, yet black workers of course carried the added burden of racism, greatly restricting their economic opportunities.15

After his early success in the turpentine camp, Jim manages a profitable citrus operation

and later an even more lucrative shrimping business, spiriting Arvay ever farther away from her poor white background. Throughout his ventures, he hires cheap African-American labor, nor is he alone in doing so, as southern industrialization increasingly favored white workers over black.

“Over 60% of the [South’s] black population in 1910 was still engaged in agriculture” (Marks

64), such as those working for Jim Meserve, whose economic exploitation of his workers mirrors the sexual and emotional exploitation of his wife. Their link is inevitable, for “once white men were persuaded that they could commit sexual assaults against Black women with impunity, their conduct toward women of their own race could not have remained unmarred” (Davis 177).

for Hurston, are attributes of the ideal individual.” Plant furthermore believes Hurston treats as normative the “use of coercive power as a male prerogative” (Plant 164, 171). 15 Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989) 60. 184

Founding their homes on the tenets of slavery, white American males resemble their Anglo

colonial counterparts.16

“As man conquers the world, so too he conquers the female,” writes Brownmiller.

“Down through the ages, imperial conquest, exploits of valor and expressions of love have gone hand in hand with violence to women” (320). When Jim and Arvay meet at the confluence of money and sexism, he reacts with fury to her unhappiness while she believes she has no right to feel it. When they marry, he explains that all he needs from her is love, comfort, and children.

“She could do that and be more than happy and satisfied,” she thinks, “but it looked too simple”

(Seraph 36), because it is. Arvay senses her need for something greater but fails to articulate such need to Jim or herself.17 Working around the clock for years to provide for his family, he

feels taken for granted by Arvay or, worse, unloved.

Yet Jim ascribes to a convention relegating women to perpetual ignorance, telling Arvay

nothing of his business affairs, the sources of the family’s growing wealth. Instead he manipulates his wife and his workers, including the Kelseys. After years of living on the

Meserve property, Jim suddenly relocates them where their work will bring him more money.

He installs the Portuguese-American Corregio family in their place, keeping all the arrangements from Arvay until one day she finds a family of strangers in her yard. That “Arvay knew nothing about the desperate struggle Jim was going through for their very existence” is no shortcoming of hers, for Jim divulges nothing (Seraph 74). He feels the marriage lacks “sufficient

16 Lowe references Torgovnick’s observation that “Western discourse of the primitive inevitably begins to overlap the tropes it uses for the female and the colonized” (Torgovnick qtd. in Lowe 32). David Headon similarly believes “Hurston subtly undermines rather than promotes the grand myth of Western culture—its ‘civilization’—the concept used most commonly to justify the barbarous excesses of European imperialism.” David Headon, “ ‘Beginning to See Things Really’: The Politics of Zora Neale Hurston,” Zora in Florida, eds. Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel (Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991) 33. 17 Hemenway also says that Jim’s injunction is too simple for Arvay, but that only Hurston understands this is so (311). 185 understanding” (Seraph 104), an understatement displaying his refusal to consider his role in their miscommunication.

In his mind, showering Arvay with gifts makes up for his degradation of her. He procures her favorite fruits, builds additions onto the house, and buys her a piano so she might enjoy music again. By such means do women and men measure success, fulfillment, and indebtedness. For Arvay, however, Jim’s gifts become empty gestures incapable of compensating for the pain he regularly causes. While revising Seraph, Hurston intimates in a letter to her publisher that Arvay is in fact to blame for her marital woes. She cites the anguish of being in a relationship “with a person who had a strong sense of inferiority”; such people overreact and misconstrue words and actions that are meant to please them. They find insults where none exist, she says, describing, without naming names, her own experience with such a person. Speaking hypothetically, she says, “A business man is out scuffling for dear life to get things for the woman he loves, and she is off pouting and accusing him of neglecting her”

(Letters 558). Clearly she describes her novel’s heroine, Arvay Meserve. The published text, however, brings the wife’s suffering to the forefront. It is telling that one of Hurston’s working titles for Seraph was But the Devil Wouldn’t Leave Her (Letters 555).

The devil in question even possesses a greater knowledge of his wife’s body than she does. Arvay “knew nothing of contraceptives, nor did Jim mention anything like that. She just noted that at certain times Jim found it convenient to stay out late, and come home tired” (Seraph

76). His worldliness extends to family planning, it seems, providing a convenient excuse for seeking carefree sex elsewhere. Ultimately, Arvay remains oblivious to the goings-on both in- and outside her house, but not willingly. “Whenever she thanked Jim for some new comfort and inquired about possible raises in his salary, Jim always answered her in a parable” (Seraph 116). 186

Continually excluded from Jim’s professional life, she musters little enthusiasm for its spoils and

is faulted for apathy and ingratitude.18 Surveying her comfortable home and two healthy,

attractive children, she believes she should feel satisfied yet “retained a residue of resentment”

(Seraph 106), more often a roiling hatred toward her husband. Although Jim denies Arvay the

freedom of such emotion, it is a crucial first step on her path to selfhood.

Marriage and the Color Line

A frequent criticism of Seraph on the Suwanee is that it borrows liberally in language and

theme from Hurston’s earlier novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). An acknowledged

masterpiece, redolent with African American folk and feminist sensibilities, Their Eyes is cited

to highlight the purportedly compromised feminism of Seraph. Instead of viewing Seraph as a

diluted version of Their Eyes, however, I consider the novels parallel texts that elucidate

Hurston’s views.19 Their Eyes’ Joe Starks, for instance, is understood to be an oppressive, psychologically abusive husband to Janie.20 Throughout their marriage, he cannot understand

Janie’s sullenness. “Here he was just pouring honor all over her; building a high chair for her to sit in and overlook the world and she here pouting over it!” he thinks, equating marital happiness with money, as does Jim Meserve (Their Eyes Were Watching God 62). Janie’s growing discontent with Joe and his wealth indicates her yearning for intellectual and spiritual fulfillment,

18 Barbara Smith believes the Meserve marriage is “constantly strained because Arvay’s deep inferiority complex will not let her believe that Jim is truly committed to her. Jim is a very hard worker and eventually becomes successful financially, raising Arvay to a station in life she never expected to reach and is not sure she deserves” (29). Barbara Smith, “Sexual Politics and the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” Radical Teacher (May 1978) 26-30. 19 I agree with St. Clair, who views Hurston’s use of lines from other works as a deliberate strategy rather than artistic laziness or carelessness. 20 Wilfred D. Samuels is one of many critics believing “Jody [Joe Starks] appropriates Janie’s voice as he relegates her to the domestic place he has determined she should occupy.” Wilfred D. Samuels, “The Light at Daybreak: Heterosexual Relationships in Hurston’s Short Stories,” Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Gloria L. Cronin (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998) 243. 187

rather than the material rewards of middle-class life.21 Yet when Arvay is unimpressed and

unhappy with her husband’s wealth, she is considered an ingrate.22 Similarly, readers rejoice

when Janie finds her voice by the end of Their Eyes. Yet Arvay’s speech throughout Seraph—

which often resembles Janie’s closely—elicits disgust. Seraph does not minimize or undercut

Janie’s sentiments, but depicts their manifestation in unhappy white women as well.

The Meserve marriage is hard-pressed to sink lower than the rape with which it begins. It

does, however, through Jim’s ongoing terrorization of Arvay, as when he tells her, newly

pregnant for the second time, that he will leave her unless she delivers a son. Arvay misses the

joke, likely remembering Jim’s earlier claim that women are duty-bound to have boys. She

spends the next several months terrified of failing and being deserted. Realizing what he has

done, Jim feels awful—and resents Arvay for causing him pain. Instead of apologizing, he

chastises her for behaving ridiculously, for lacking a sense of humor, although given her

upbringing, a sense of humor is the last thing she is likely to have.23 “What cause have you ever

had to doubt me, Arvay,” he asks. “Have I ever mistreated you in any way whatsoever?”

(Seraph 104) Arvay only has to recall the rape to answer the disingenuous question and its open

challenge to defy him. Arvay seethes because she has been made a fool of all over again.24

Nor is it the last time. Throughout her marriage, she is cajoled, scolded, and humored by

Jim, but never treated with respect or as an adult. He laughs at her anxieties, calls her his girl, his baby, his play-pretty, and makes important decisions regarding their children without

21 Meisenhelder observes, “Hurston does not portray Janie finding fulfillment in two marriages where she is financially secure,” and that “Janie’s refusal to accept her grandmother’s admonitions suggest that all women of African descent are not overwhelmed by material possessions and financial security, and they do not always regard themselves as reflections of their husbands—no matter how prosperous” (140). 22 Jim is “rather loud and domineering,” Barbara Smith concedes, “though not so obnoxious as Jody Starks” (29). 23 Lowe similarly writes, “Arvay’s psychological and emotional problems almost exclusively stem from a lifelong pattern of real and perceived rejection and a consequent stunting of her sense of humor” (260). 188 consulting her. Professing to worship her like a princess affirms his determination to deny her selfhood and establish expectations she cannot possibly meet.25 His words ring more hollow given his infidelities. Staying away all night, getting drunk, going to jook joints with his workers, Jim revels in male privilege and excess while his wife stays home alone. He particularly “fancies pretty women, the kind that gave him a tussle to get” (Seraph 228). A middle-aged man now, Jim still prefers taking women by force.

He continues using force on his wife as well. Seraph on the Suwanee contains many instances of Jim’s physical abuse of Arvay, inevitable given the precedent set under the mulberry tree. He regularly grabs, shoves, pushes her, and otherwise moves her bodily around the house.

In one particularly torturous scene, for by now Jim more adeptly mixes physical and psychological degradation, he forces Arvay to strip and stand naked in front of him. For what seems like hours to Arvay, he alternates between stony silence and verbal attacks, claiming his biggest mistake “was in not starting you off with a good beating just as soon as I married you”

(Seraph 215). Ordering her into bed, he “stretched himself full length upon her, but in the same way that he might have laid himself down on a couch” (Seraph 217)—a clue to some critics that he does not actually rape her. That moments earlier Arvay “stood there with her legs close together” (Seraph 216), however, indicates her fear of another sexual assault.

Arvay’s Defenses

24 As Ann duCille notes, however, “Jim’s teasing is all the more thoughtlessly unkind because he knows from a long line of unappreciated pranks that Arvay does not enjoy a joke, particularly if it is on her” (Coupling Convention 134). 25 “In Hurston’s work,” writes Plant, “ ‘mulatto’ and white characters are usually cast in a fairy-tale-like ambience and have a spellbinding effect on those around them” (150). Yet in Hurston, the fairy-tale is brought low, for Arvay’s delicate looks mainly elicit lewd stares and comments. 189

Arvay’s body language displays her terror. During arguments, she sits with her skirts wrapped tightly around her legs, while Jim’s facial expressions alone cause her to fling “up her forearm to ward off a blow” (Seraph 253). By the novel’s end, his aggression has not abated as he takes “hold of her arm very firmly” (Seraph 320) to guide her around his boat. In her cabin at night, he approaches her “like he was stalking a prey. Involuntarily, Arvay flinched” (Seraph

347). That many readers gloss over Jim’s abuse—and that Arvay seems at times to revel in it— illustrates Hurston’s insights into both genders’ investment in patriarchy. Hurston’s subtle involvement of readers, along with Jim, in the abuse of women exposes how both sexes perpetuate women’s second-class status in society.

Often when their arguments draw to a close, Arvay embraces Jim—the source of confusion, no doubt, over whether she loathes or thrills to the abuse heaped upon her.

Brownmiller’s study of rape explains Arvay’s actions as her best means of defense, for “some rapists have an edge that is more than physical,” she writes. “They operate within an institutionalized setting that works to their advantage and in which a victim has little chance to redress her grievance. Rape in slavery and rape in wartime are two such examples. But rapists may also operate within an emotional setting,” like marriage (283). As late as the 1970s, wives raped by their husbands had no legal recourse. “[T]he idea that a husband could be prosecuted for raping his wife was unthinkable” (427). So is conceiving of Arvay resisting Jim and leaving her marriage.

With disinterested parents, a hostile sister, and no money, Arvay has nowhere to turn. A victim of sexual violence “cannot win; at best she can escape defeat” (Brownmiller 402) or try to avoid further injury, particularly within her own marriage. Thus Arvay grabs hold of Jim after he forces her to strip, but only briefly, while complaining to him of his brutish behavior. 190

Collapsing into terror and tears, she realizes she can never escape him. “It is no wonder, then, that most women confronted by physical aggression fall apart at the seams and suffer a paralysis of will. We have been trained to cry, to wheedle, to plead, to look for a male protector, but we have never been trained to fight and win,” writes Brownmiller (452).26 Arvay’s powerlessness is a part of Hurston’s ongoing investigations into misogyny.27

In addition, Hurston’s emphasis on the violence against Arvay responds to the beating of

Janie by her third husband, Tea Cake, in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Because there appears to be no narrative condemnation of the abuse, because afterward men regard Tea Cake with awe and envy, because he is lauded for encouraging Janie’s selfhood, many readers believe Hurston accepts if not condones violence against women.28 “Perhaps the most stunning silence [. . .] occurs after Tea Cake beats Janie,” writes Mary Helen Washington, the rare critic who reads the novel as one of female voicelessness. “The beating is seen entirely through the eyes of the male

26 Toni Morrison depicts a similar dynamic in her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in which eleven-year old Pecola Breedlove is raped by her father. Madonne M. Miner says, “In depicting the effects of rape on one young woman, Morrison sets into motion a series of associations that take their cue from gender. Men, potential rapists, assume presence, language, and reason as their particular province. Women, potential victims, fall prey to absence, silence, and madness.” Madonne M. Miner, “Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye,” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) 181. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970). 27 As Wall sees it, the “problem [with Seraph] is Hurston’s inability to grant her protagonist the resources that would permit her to claim autonomy (“Zora Neale Hurston” 96). 28 Many critics weigh in on Hurston’s treatment of violence against women. Of Their Eyes, Samuels writes, “In the confrontations in which domestic violence is accepted or normal, each party grants ownership rights to the other; bodies are not merely independently appropriated without consent” (250). Plant quotes Dianne Sadoff: “ ‘Hurston profoundly distrusts heterosexual relationships because she thinks them based on male dominance and willing female submission; yet such inequality appears necessary to the institution of marriage. In her autobiography, for example, Hurston blames her mother for not submitting fully to her father and so robbing him of “that conquesting feeling” (Plant 21). In an unpublished passage from Dust Tracks, Hurston also blamed her father for not having the nerve to subdue her mother through physical force (Plant 167). Biographer Valerie Boyd writes that during Hurston’s childhood, “the blossoming women’s movement was barely a bud [in Eatonville]. It wasn’t uncommon, in those days, for men to sit on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store and brag about beating their wives” (Boyd 30). Hurston’s Eatonville Anthology contains several tales in which “women are routinely beaten by their husbands with no comment from the community (or from Hurston). [. ..] In Hurston’s portrayal, the people of Eatonville accepted misfortune of all types [. . .] as karmic debts they were bound to pay” (Boyd 139). Discussing the violence against Janie in Their Eyes, however, Boyd references Hurston’s personal experience as evidence of her condemnation of the beating: “A parallel can be drawn from Hurston’s own life: When the man she loved hit her, she did not 191

community” (102), who marvels at the visibility of each bruise on Janie’s light skin. Conversely,

Valerie Boyd believes the beating “is the point where Hurston hints that Janie and Tea Cake’s marriage is doomed” (304),29 despite Janie’s fawning over him after the attack. bell hooks

concurs, saying Hurston “calls attention to the way in which male notions of female inferiority

must be continually reaffirmed by active aggression” (Remembered Rapture 182). With rape the

defining image of Seraph on the Suwanee, as well as its effects on Arvay, Hurston’s abhorrence of violence against women is clear, from the “good-natured laughter at the expense of women” in

Their Eyes (78) to the pummeling of women’s bodies in both novels. At least Janie’s sexual

initiation is gentle, exhilarating, and autonomous beneath a fragrant, blossoming pear tree.

Arvay’s first sexual experience is brutal and forced, and her tree sprouts gnarled, wormy buds.

Arvay may seem like the “model of irrationality [. . .] insecure, introverted, and inferior- feeling” (duCille, Coupling Convention 130), yet given her degrading child- and womanhood, her ensuing personality is fitting, if not particularly admirable. Critics remark that Arvay is not likable, and therefore not a viable literary subject.30 Because she represents so many women caught in dissatisfying, even dangerous marriages, however, she animates Hurston’s exploration of women’s identity formation. The bulk of Seraph’s narrative concerns Arvay’s self-hatred.

She feels like a slave, a nonperson in Jim’s presence, and her daily struggles for psychological survival cause her to fear and suspect the men around her. Because many are African American

(Jim’s laborers), her hatred toward males manifests itself as racism. Given her psychological makeup and social milieu, their color is an easier target for derision than their sex, the real foe.

immediately order him to get out. Instead, by her own account, she tried to take responsibility for the fight. Yet a part of her knew, at that very moment, that the relationship could not last” (Boyd 304). 29 Lillie P. Howard notes that in many of Hurston’s early short stories, as well as Their Eyes, the male partner in unhappy marriages “is always eliminated” while “the woman is left intact, available, as it were, for another, hopefully happier marriage” (Zora Neale Hurston 70). Deborah Plant, however, sees neither Their Eyes nor Seraph as feminist, for “[a]mong the differing criteria for a feminist or womanist text, woman as an autonomous, self- determining, self-defining agent is a constant” (168). 192

“Hurston’s heroine,” writes Delia Konzett, “though weak and subservient, is ultimately shown to assert her racial privileges albeit in a passive and indirect fashion” (“Getting in Touch”

135). Her distrust of Joe Kelsey for his excessive influence on Jim leads her to inflict racial slurs and slights on him and his family. Of Arvay’s racism, Hurston says, in a letter to her publisher enclosed with the manuscript of Seraph, “I am conscious that the use of ‘nigger’ in the text will offend some Negro readers. However, I am objective in my observations, and I know, as they know honestly, that the heroine would have certainly used that word” (Letters 555). As a woman, Arvay is powerless. As a white woman, she has at her disposal centuries of artificial and arbitrary notions of racial superiority.

Hurston on Race

The roots and manifestations of Arvay’s racism deserve careful inquiry, as do Hurston’s

own views on the subject. In the early days of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston opposed the

notion of African-American art as a means of attaining racial equality. Her immersion in

Florida’s black folk culture and her use of the black vernacular troubled other writers, embarrassed by what they believed were demeaning holdovers from slavery.31 Yet in the first

decades of the twentieth century, nearly ninety percent of African Americans lived in the rural

South.32 Thus Hurston eschewed the “careful, measured cadences of Du Bois’s talented tenth”

for a more organic discourse (Lowe 3). “In this sense alone she altered the terms of black-white

literary discourse” (Lowe 3), as when she and several others, including Wallace Thurman,

30 See Campbell 131 and Holloway, “The Emergent Voice” 73, for example. 31 Jessie Fauset, conversely, had no ear or appreciation for dialect. Her biographer, Carolyn Sylvander, writes, “Heavy use of dialect always bothered Fauset, perhaps because that characteristic alone was enough to relegate a Black to the bottom of any heap in her growing-up years for mocking, scornful humor” (Sylvander 109). 32 Vashti Crutcher Lewis, “The Declining Significance of the Mulatto Female as Major Character in the Novels of Zora Neale Hurston,” CLA, 28:2 (1984) 139. 193

Langston Hughes, and Aaron Douglas, collaborated on a literary magazine that would counter

the racial uplift agenda of Crisis and Opportunity. The sole issue of Fire!!, published in

November 1926, contained art and literature “aesthetically undiluted by sociological issues and

propaganda efforts” (Boyd 122). Fire!! was among Hurston’s many assertions of authentic

African-American artistic expression.

In her essays, she drew fire of another kind by disassociating herself from the “sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal”

(“How it Feels to Be Colored Me” [1928], Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings 827). Having grown up in Eatonville, Florida, the country’s first incorporated all-black town, Hurston possessed a strong sense of racial health33 and, some would say, a willful disregard of racism’s

devastating, often deadly consequences for African Americans living in the South.34 It was not

just her Eatonville childhood that led to her sense of racial wholeness, however. Hired in her early twenties as a maid to an actress in a traveling drama troupe, Hurston “lived communally

among a variety pack of white people— Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and Jewish—who were demystified

and humanized in her eyes as a result of proximity” (Boyd 71). She came to appreciate

individuals rather than to pigeon-hole races.35 Nevertheless, citing slavery as “the price I paid

for civilization” (“Colored Me,” Other Writings 827) did not endear her to Harlem Renaissance

33 In her introduction to A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (Walker, ed.), Mary Helen Washington says Eatonville “was neither ghetto, nor slum, nor black bottom, but a rich source of black cultural traditions where Zora would be nourished on black folktales and tropical fruits and sheltered from the early contacts with racial prejudice that have so indelibly marked almost all other Afro-American writers” (9). 34 “Seeing Eatonville with a child’s eyes meant that the harsh edges of life in a Jim Crow South seldom came into view,” writes Hemenway (218). Nevertheless, Cheryl Wall believes that when Hurston “claims [in her essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me”] that discrimination ‘astonishes’ rather than angers her, she seems hopelessly naïve” (Wall, Women 147). 35 Hurston’s tenure with the drama company was nevertheless complicated by the actors’ ongoing “practical jokes [upon her], often with sexual or racial undertones. [. . .] The racial jokes [. . .] discouraged Zora from being overly sensitive about race, she reasoned.” They also prompted her to play jokes of her own (Boyd 70-1). 194

stalwarts.36 Throughout her career, whether involved in anthropology, fiction, drama, or

folklore, she strove to present the richness of rural black life unadulterated by white standards.

Hurston’s relationship with her white patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, complicates her

conception of autonomous black life. A wealthy widow, Mrs. Mason financed several Harlem

Renaissance luminaries, who were required to call her “Godmother” and never divulge the

source of their funding. Throughout their five-year association, Mason both enabled Hurston’s

folklore-collecting expeditions and crippled her artistic freedom. As Hurston’s first biographer,

Robert E. Hemenway, explains, “Not only did Mrs. Mason’s largess enable Zora to do the basic

field work that established her fame as a folklorist; it also eventually led to dependency and

bitterness” (105).37 Valerie Boyd also writes of the convoluted dynamic between the two

women. While Mason’s patronage allowed Hurston to live as a professional writer —nearly

unheard of for an African-American woman at the time—it exacted a toll. By the terms of their

contract, Hurston’s work belonged to Mason.38 A self-professed mother to the “primitives,”39

Mason was even incensed at “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” not because of its inflammatory

content but because Hurston did not seek her permission to publish it.40 There are also the

36 In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois cites the lingering scourge of racism in “two passing figures of the present-past [the master and the slave]; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their children’s children live today” (26). 37 Hemenway also provides details on the Hughes-Mason relationship: “When a rich woman is interested in a person’s work, pressing fifty-dollar bills into his hands without asking anything in return, it is not easy to see the self-satisfaction she needs. The situation becomes a power relationship” (107). 38 Boyd 173. 39 Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive helps clarify Mason’s fascination with her “primitives.” “To study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world which is also a familiar world,” Torgovnick writes. “Primitives are like children, the tropes say. Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces—libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies. Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the ‘lowest cultural levels’; we occupy the ‘highest’ [. . .]. The ensemble of these tropes—however miscellaneous and contradictory— forms the basic grammar and vocabulary of what I call primitivist discourse, a discourse fundamental to the Western sense of self and Other” (Torgovnick 8). 40 Torgovnick 8. 195 infamous expense reports Mason demanded of Hurston, delineating money spent—down to the last penny—on everything from food to sanitary napkins.41

Hurston’s letters to Mason (and other whites) are an intricate blend of adulation and self- promotion. Her collected letters in fact comprise “a case study in strategic negotiations and contradictory locations [. . .] ‘fictions of self-revelation’ addressed to readers whose particularities they take into account” (Kaplan, Letters 20). Hurston cared for Mason, believed they shared a psychic link, and took pains to convey her genuine appreciation of her financial support.42 Nevertheless, many of her letters seem degradingly servile. On Mason’s birthday,

May 18, 1930, Hurston writes, “May I be spared for a long long time so that I may throw back a bit of the radiance you shed on me. And may the reds and blues and greens and perples [sic] of the untrammeled gods of the primitives wrap you forever and never may your light beams waver” (Letters 189). A letter of March 10, 1931, addresses “The Guard-Mother who sits in the

Twelth [sic] Heaven and shapes the destinies of the primitives” (Letters 212), while on

September 28, 1932, she says, “Next to Mahatma Gandhi, you are the most spiritual person on earth” (Letters 274). She occasionally signs off as Godmother’s “pickaninny” or “darky,” and sums up her Mule Bone dispute with Hughes as “my nigger mess” (Letters 206).43

John Lowe compares Hurston’s posturing to Mason with African Americans’ passing for white in the early twentieth century. Both types of masking “facilitated African Americans’ survival” (20), as did what Hurston describes in Mules and Men as their feather-bed resistance.

41 In a letter to Hughes, Hurston writes of Mason, “I just feel that she ought not to exert herself to supervise every little detail. It destroys my self-respect and utterly demoralizes me for weeks” (Letters 156). A letter to Mason of April 27, 1932 illustrates Mason’s stringent control over Hurston’s spending: “One other item of expense, Godmother. I really need a pair of shoes. You remember that we discussed the matter in the fall and agreed that I should own only one pair at a time” (Letters 253). See also Kaplan pp. 48 and 230 for further references to Hurston’s expense accounts. 42 Boyd 159. 43 Hurston’s long and cherished friendship with Hughes was irrevocably damaged by their failed collaboration on the play Mule Bone. Valerie Boyd’s biography of Hurston contains a detailed account of the affair. 196

“The Indian resists [white people’s] curiosity by stony silence,” she writes. “The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries” (Mules and Men 2-3). As Carla Kaplan explains, the strategy is “not just play. It is deception necessitated by social inequality” (Letters 21).44 Nor was Hurston the only Mason protégé to act in such a manner. Langston Hughes was not above placating Mason throughout his own “luxurious servitude” (Boyd 158),45 as well as keeping the traveling Hurston apprised of Mason’s moods.46 Furthermore, some of Hurston’s more obsequious letters were written during the Great Depression, when unemployment for African

Americans far exceeded that for whites47 and when Godmother began cutting back sharply on her funding.48 When Hurston and Mason parted ways toward the end of 1932, Hurston was finally artistically free. “I have kicked loose from the Park Avenue dragon and still I am alive!”

44 Meisenhelder similarly notes, “Hurston repeatedly pointed out how the appearance of subservience can be a self- conscious mask blacks use to their advantage. Often treated by whites as a ‘pet Negro’ in her personal and literary life, Hurston exploited such a persona in much of her writing. Planning her own ‘racial manipulation’ in her books, she rarely addressed race in ways that might offend white readers; instead, she adopted a more subversive strategy, often donning the mask of ‘the colorful darky’ to gain entry into mainstream publishing circles while submerging the treatment of controversial themes” (4). Of Hurston’s FWP experience, Bordelon similarly explains, “Hurston played the self-proclaimed role of ‘pet darkey’ [with her white boss, Carita Doggett Corse]. Today the idea seems shameful, but at the time it was a clever stratagem that Hurston used to forge a special connection with Florida’s FWP director and win favors not extended to others” (Bordelon 18). 45 “Mason not only doled out monthly allowances to her mostly male protégés, she also supplied them with hard-to- get theater tickets and, at least in Hughes’s case, fine bond writing paper and even finer suits from the best shops on Fifth Avenue. Seeking to remove any drains on Hughes’s creativity, Mason even footed the bill for Langston’s recalcitrant stepbrother, Gwyn Clark, to attend a New England preparatory school” (Boyd 158). 46 David Levering Lewis also states that Hughes’s first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930), “has much ‘darky’ wisdom and not a little minstrelsy to help sales.” David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 251. 47 Kaplan notes, “Black unemployment was as much as three times higher than it was for whites” during the Depression (161). Boyd states it was five times higher in Harlem, and that “Harlem’s median family income plummeted 43.6 percent during the Depression’s first three years” (218). Kaplan also discusses New York City’s ensuing “slave markets,” in which “African American women by the thousands, many of whom had never done domestic work before, lined the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx hoping for a day’s domestic work” (162). In This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981), Jervis Anderson writes, “Of all the art forms in Harlem, poetry and fiction were the hardest hit by the Depression” (280). 48 Langston Hughes also feared losing Mason’s support. “’I love you, Godmother. I need you,’” he begged. “Despite Hughes’s despairing missives, the door to 399 Park Avenue appeared to be permanently closed to him [. . .]. Godmother had decided to rid herself of her Negro protégés [. . .] because they were all a lost cause” (Boyd 203). 197

she writes exultantly, in “one of the most pointed and bitter” references to Mason she ever made

(Letters 184).

Hurston is nevertheless unafraid to criticize whites to Mason. In numerous letters, she

laments white appropriation of black art forms and vows to people her pages and stages with the

“Negro farthest down” (Dust Tracks on a Road 145). Casting The Great Day, she writes of

finding “a fine black girl as a contralto soloist, and a lovely black girl as soprano. This baritone is a dark brown also. No mulattoes at all” (Letters 233). While in the FWP, she wrote a piece, published posthumously, on another black American incorporated town, Goldsborough, Florida, exposing its Jim Crow restrictions, hostilities, and deadly violence against blacks.49 Without

subscribing to Du Bois’s uplift agenda, she imbues her work with political, particularly feminist,

consciousness.50 Short stories such as “Sweat” (1926) and “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933) concern

marriage, money, and women’s identity, while her theatrical productions showcase African-

American history.51

In addition, Hurston intended parts of her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942),

to chronicle racist American tenets, particularly the hypocrisy of warring for freedom overseas

while denying it to black citizens at home. “U.S. involvement in the war greatly influenced

Bertram Lippincott’s reading of Hurston’s manuscript,” however (Boyd 349).52 An excised

chapter called “Seeing the World As It Is” critiqued American principles as well as its President:

49 Bordelon 125. 50 Headon 32. 51 Hurston’s involvement in drama was extensive during the early 1930s. Her stage productions include Fast and Furious, Batouala, Mules and Men, The Great Day, From Sun to Sun, and Singing Steel (Kaplan, Letters 163). 52 Anderson writes, “As the First World War had done, the Second confronted blacks with one of the historic problems of their citizenship—whether and how to fight abroad in defense of freedoms that were denied to them at home.” Furthermore, it was not “until 1948 [. . .] that the President, then Harry Truman, ordered that the armed forces end their policy of racial segregation” (290). Hazel Carby also writes, in her introduction to Seraph, “For all black people, the Second World War embodied the acute contradictions in mobilizing against the ideology of fascism abroad, on the one hand, and, on the other, living with the fascist practices of racism and segregation at home” (Seraph x). 198

“[Roosevelt] can call names across an ocean,” Hurston wrote, “but he evidently has not the

courage to speak even softly at home” (Boyd 349). Restricted from such commentary, the final

publication appears to downplay or ignore the sufferings of African Americans.53

Hurston knew such omissions, deliberate or forced, problematized her writing. In a 1932

letter to Edwin Osgood Grover, a creative arts professor at Rollins College in Winter Park,

Florida, she asks if he would be willing to review the manuscript of Mules and Men. “Of course

I am not interested in Sociology,” she writes, “and see no need for a mention of problems of the

kind and I am wondering if the publishers will think I ought to appear slightly wrought up”

(Letters 260). Her refusal to define black culture against a white backdrop gives Mules and Men,

for instance, “an appearance of political naïveté and the absence of an immediate historical

presence” (Hemenway 221). Asking Fannie Hurst to write the introduction to Jonah’s Gourd

Vine (1934), she says she does “not attempt to solve any problems” in the novel. “I tried to deal

with life as we actually live it—not as the Sociologists imagine it” (Letters 286). Hurston is not

oblivious to social problems but chooses to privilege other themes in her writing.

In later essays she is more forthcoming yet no less controversial. “The ‘Pet’ Negro

System” (1943) explains how each white southern man has his own favorite Negro, extolled for

being better than his brethren, thus viewed as an anomaly and used to denigrate the masses

further. (Jim Meserve’s relationship with Joe Kelsey in Seraph exemplifies the arrangement,54

as early in the novel, the narrative consciousness slides briefly from Arvay’s into one that

knowingly discusses the arrangement.) In the tones of a faux-minister —“Brothers and Sisters, I take my text this morning from the Book of Dixie” (Other Writings 914)—Hurston both deplores

53 Hurston’s remarks on slavery in Dust Tracks are particularly provoking: “From what I can learn, it was sad. Certainly. But my ancestors who lived and died in it are dead. The white men who profited by their labor and lives are dead also. I have no personal memory of those times, nor no responsibility for them. Neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks” (228). Also see Plant 23. 199

and, some readers believe, appears to accept the system for easing what would otherwise be the

South’s even more explosive racial tensions. In “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience”

(1944), Hurston recounts her 1931 visit to a New York City doctor who examined her in a closet, so mortifying was her presence to him and his staff.55 “I went away feeling the pathos of Anglo-

Saxon civilization,” she writes. “And I still mean pathos, for I know that anything with such a

false foundation cannot last” (Other Writings 936). Her 1945 essay, “Crazy for This

Democracy,” lambastes U.S. diplomacy and colonialism, playing on Roosevelt’s term for

America, the Arsenal of Democracy, by calling it the “arse-and-all,” feigning to have misheard

him (Other Writings 946).

Hurston takes on American education as well, criticizing certain black colleges, in her

1945 essay, “The Rise of the Begging Joints,” for drawing underprivileged children into inferior classrooms only to churn them out unfit for employment. In a letter to the editor of the Orlando

Sentinel on August 11, 1955, she denounces Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme

Court decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.56 Desegregation, in Hurston’s

view, reinforced the racist notion that only by associating with whites could African Americans improve themselves. While this may have been “a completely consistent opinion for the daughter of Eatonville to have [. . .] it seemed out of touch with the truth of most black people’s lives,” ignoring the fact that “most black schools in the South were far from equal to white schools—not because of the absence of white people, but because of the absence of resources”

(Boyd 424).

54 Konzett, “Getting in Touch” 132. 55 No longer affiliated with Mason, Hurston is free to explain, in the essay’s first paragraph, that in 1931, “Mrs. R. Osgood Mason was financing my researches in anthropology. [. . .] Godmother [. . .] became concerned about my condition and suggested a certain white specialist at her expense” (Hurston, Other Writings 935). 56 Boyd 423. 200

Insisting upon African America’s overall health, Hurston nevertheless recognized

problems within her communities. Writing to Grover from Eatonville in 1932, she complains

that the “unmoral [. . .] town is luke warm to schools, civic improvement, etc.” (Letters 260), all

the more reason to take advantage of its enthusiasm for the arts. A year and a half later, she

reminds Grover, “I have been so interested in a Civic Center [in Eatonville] or something to give

the young folks something to do besides hang around the shop (and fornicate)” (Letters 496).

While the 1930s marked a period of prolific literary output for Hurston,57 by the 1940s she

became increasingly involved in politics, voicing strong opinions on segregation in the military,

the Detroit race riot of 1943, and the hypocrisy of northern liberals.58 In 1945 she approached

Du Bois about establishing a cemetery in Florida for “the illustrious Negro dead” (Letters 518).

In 1947, she wrote about gangs and drug use among Harlem’s troubled teenagers, and organized

a group of block mothers to care for children whose mothers worked the night shift.59 In 1950, she wrote “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” outlining the means by which the white establishment manipulates stereotypes to maintain power. In December 1952, the Saturday

Evening Post published her laudatory article on Robert Taft, Republican senator from Ohio. She

was even invited to campaign and debate for Taft, yet declined the offer, lacking the proper

clothing to travel North in cold weather.60

57 Kaplan 163. 58 Boyd 383. See also Carla Kaplan’s introductory section on “The Forties” in Letters (429-449), and Hurston’s March 5, 1943 letter to Countee Cullen, in which she writes, “I have offended several ‘liberals’ among the whites [. . .]. I have been infuriated by having them ask me outright, or by strong implication if I am not happy over the white left-wing associating with Negroes. I always say no. Then I invariably ask why the association should give a Negro so much pleasure? Why any more pleasure than association with a black ‘liberal’? They never fail to flare up at that which proves that they are paying for the devout worship that many Negroes give them in the cheap coin of patronage, which proves that they feel the same superiority of race that they claim to deny” (Letters 481). 59 Boyd 383-4. Anderson also describes Harlem at mid-century: “If Black Harlem was once a heaven, or was seen to be one by the migrants and the commentators of the nineteen-twenties, it had ceased to be that by the beginning of the nineteen-fifties. When the early optimism had been exhausted, there remained, among the majority of the population, almost all the racial and social hardships that many had hoped would be nonexistent in the finest urban community that blacks had ever occupied in the United States” (347). 60 Boyd 410-11. 201

Leading to Seraph

Given Hurston’s opinions, she may well be “American literature’s most controversial writer” (Kaplan, Letters 26). Her last novel, then, is no anomaly but the culmination of a lifetime of unapologetic thought. Always eager to explore new themes, Hurston defies the proscription on black writers to write only about black characters.61 bell hooks takes a similar position in Remembered Rapture, a collection of essays on her writing life, in which she lauds

Hurston’s literary fearlessness and rejects the injunction upon black women authors to undertake only certain themes.62 Alice Walker similarly declines to categorize literature racially. To

Walker, African-American and white writers appear “to be writing one immense story—the same story, for the most part—with different parts of this immense story coming from a multitude of perspectives” (Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 5).

Hurston does not turn her back on her creative source in Seraph,63 the African-American folk—evidenced by the echoing of earlier pieces throughout the novel—but draws the material into Seraph to depict America’s “racialized culture” (Tate, “Whiteface Novel” 380). The

61 On November 2, 1942, Hurston writes to Carl Van Vechten of her desire to have Seraph made into a movie. “Having been on the writing staff at PARAMOUNT for several months,” she writes, “I have a tiny wedge in Hollywood, and I have hopes of breaking that old silly rule about Negroes not writing about white people” (Letters 467). 62 bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999) 169. Hooks also notes that playwright Lorraine Hansberry “was equally fascinated by the lives of white people across class. Her black identity did not mean that she could not make white characters center stage” (hooks 217). Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby contains white protagonists. Even Marcus Garvey believed black writers should not have to limit themselves “solely to racial themes. Garvey himself did not do so. His own poetry included items on racially neutral topics” (Tony Martin, Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts and the Harlem Renaissance [Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1983] 8). Alice Walker praises Ernest J. Gaines, a black writer from rural Louisiana who can nevertheless “write about whites and blacks exactly as he sees them and knows them, instead of writing of one group as a vast malignant lump and of the other as a conglomerate of perfect virtues.” Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) 19. 63 Hemenway says, “In writing Seraph on the Suwanee Zora Neale Hurston largely turned her back on the source of her creativity” (307). Yet as Konzett explains, “Hurston did not believe she was leaving her black folk culture behind, as many critics have accused her of doing. Instead, she saw herself as depicting and imagining a New South in which the socio-cultural bonds between blacks and whites are staged and thereby acknowledged” (“Getting in Touch” 134). 202

Meserves’ reliance on black labor, verbalization of black idioms, and internalized dynamics of

slavery dismantle artificial boundaries between white and black. “Neat binary distinctions,

Hurston realized, are not operable in the context of race” (Konzett, “Getting in Touch” 133).

She does not betray the rich African-American folk culture of her earlier work; rather she reveals its bastardization in Seraph’s white characters. Ultimately, however, Seraph is a study of marriage infected by aggression, powerlessness, and the limited resources available to women victimized within their own homes.

Historicizing Seraph

As after the First World War, the number of working women after World War II dropped

significantly. “Six million female workers were employed during the war years [. . .]. Black

women were well represented in these statistics,” yet their jobs “were the traditional ones of

janitor and scrubwoman” (Wade-Gayles 18-19). After the war, however, “a concerted campaign

developed among political leaders, the media and employers to persuade women to return to the

home” (Wade-Gayles 21).64 Arvay Henson never works outside the home, nor does she ever

express a desire to do so. Hurston’s politics during the war years, however, influence Seraph’s account of a housewife whose husband benefits from Florida’s economic growth while she remains socially and economically paralyzed. As Hurston’s 1946 essay, “The Lost Keys of

Glory,” satirizes contemporary women’s roles,65 so does the character of Arvay. With African-

American women at mid-century still restricted primarily to domestic work, still needing to work

64 Laura Dubek cites “Glenna Matthews’s study of the evolution of domesticity in America,” stating that, “although World War II sent millions of American housewives into the labor force, the age of anxiety engendered by the Cold War and the nuclear threat brought a swift return to traditional gender roles and the idea of the home as an apolitical haven.” Laura Dubek, “The Social Geography of Race in Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee,” African American Review, 30.3 (1996) 348. 65 Boyd 383. 203

outside the home to survive economically, Arvay’s discontent in her comfortable house is both

understandable and absurd.66

Throughout Seraph, Hurston delineates the personal and political facets of Arvay’s anguish. To her husband, Arvay’s invective against the Corregios seems unfounded and exaggerated, yet is another of her attempts to puff herself up at others’ expense. Although

Corregio’s wife is American—a southerner, in fact—Arvay considers the entire family

“foreigners, and no foreigners were ever quite white to Arvay” (Seraph 120). They talk strangely, their food is a “Geechy” mess, and their beautiful daughters can only mean trouble for her husband and sons. The narrative makes clear, however, the real source of her disdain: Jim moves the Corregios in secretively, and “Arvay couldn’t say that she liked it at all. It was as if he called himself slipping something over on her” (Seraph 121). Once more, she feels like a fool, and as she predicts, trouble ensues when her retarded son, Earl, attempts to rape the

Corregios’ elder daughter, Lucy Ann.67 With a posse out hunting her runaway son, Arvay despairs that once again, men, including her husband, conspire to destroy what she treasures.

Bringing Arvay the news of Earl’s death, Jim says, “Our child, born out of our deep sweet love,

is dead, honey” (Seraph 155), when Earl was in fact the product of the first rape.68 Weeks later,

Jim scolds Arvay for using her grief as an excuse to withhold sex and forces himself on her. “

66 Dubek states, “In Hurston’s novel Arvay exhausts herself (and severely tries the reader’s patience) not by toiling in the home but by worrying incessantly about whether or not she is pleasing her husband. Arvay clearly challenges the [white] feminist representation of white women as products of grinding domestic labor, as unpaid and overworked servants” (349). Angela Davis says, “as late as 1960 at least one-third of Black women workers remained chained to the same old household jobs [as domestic workers] and an additional one-fifth were non- domestic service workers.” Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983) 98. 67 In Earl’s attack on Lucy Ann Corregio, Campbell sees Hurston’s more serious indictment of rape. “Not only does she force us to pay attention to what rape is about, but she does not let us shrug off rape as an act of derangement, some sort of anomaly [. . . because] Too many so-called ‘normal’ men in the novel indulge themselves—or desire to, anyway—in rape.” (145) 68 “Hurston’s critique of the white world’s model of male sexuality,” writes Meisenhelder, “is also suggested imagistically in her treatment of Earl, the child conceived under the mulberry tree and the appropriate symbolic offspring of such a twisted relationship” (102-3). 204

‘Stop!’ Arvay shouts. “But Jim did not stop, and Arvay did not resist him” (Seraph 158).

Instead she directs her rage elsewhere.

Arvay debases not just those darker than she, but anyone she perceives as a threat.

Appalled by their shabbiness, she regards her sister’s family as “an awful gang of

Crackers”(Seraph 133). When a local prostitute complains to Jim that his young son, Kenny, insulted her, Arvay interprets her actions as a come-on to Jim and launches a stream of vulgar insults that makes the woman cry. Jim enjoys the women’s fight and surely appreciates the comment from Kenny that prompts Fast Mary’s anger—that her genitals, exposed when she leans back on her steps, “look like a mulberry pie” (Seraph 162, emphasis added), another instance linking the mulberry tree with lewdness and attacks on women. Yet Arvay saves her greatest wrath for her daughter Angela’s boyfriend, Hatton Howland, spitting the word “Yankee” when she hears his name and warning Angie away from him.

Her fears for her daughter are confirmed, she believes, as one day she overhears Angie and Hatton joking about rape. Arvay springs into action, grabbing a gun and bursting into the room, prepared to shoot Hatton dead. When Jim enters the house and learns what is happening, he laughs and shoves Arvay into their bedroom. For him, rape is a natural component of courtship, nothing to be alarmed at, although as Brownmiller notes, “To talk about rape, even with nervous laughter is to acknowledge a woman’s special victim status” (343). In fact Hatton does not rape Angie, and the couple have what looks to be a long and loving marriage. Yet their marriage also mixes money and property. Jim consents to the marriage—without Arvay’s knowledge—to please his daughter, but mainly to bring Hatton into his real estate ventures.

Another sign of Arvay’s demoralization is her comparing herself unfavorably to others.

On the night Jim forces her to strip, the family is at Kenny’s high school football game 205

beforehand. Arvay is miserable, shy and self-conscious around her children’s friends’ parents,

more educated and cultivated than she. “Listening to the people around her, she became terribly conscious of her way of speech. She hated to open her mouth for fear of making a balk, and

putting her children to shame” (Seraph 210). Even worse, she sees that Jim has outfitted the

younger Corregio daughter, Felicia, with beautiful new clothes. Arvay redirects her anger at Jim

toward Felicia and what appears to be the girl’s appropriation of her son. She becomes jealous,

for Felicia is gorgeous, dressed from head to toe in white, an “unbelievable mass of curly black

hair” cascading down her back (Seraph 207). Far from internalizing white standards of beauty,

Hurston’s descriptions of the glowing white girl reveal Arvay’s self-hatred. Because she is

blonde, she envies Felicia’s dark hair. Because she has already lost one son, she fears losing

another. She pictures “Earl growling [. . .]. Lucy Ann lying still and white and bleeding on the

ground” (Seraph 212, my italics), conjuring up a dizzying image of sex, race, and dread, hating the Corregios not for their ethnicity but for their association with Earl’s demise and the potential loss of Kenny.69

Arvay does assert herself over the years, if weakly, for in Seraph, Hurston “introduces the figure of the willful wife who resists the traditional dominant-submissive power dynamic of male-female relations” (duCille, Coupling Convention 10). Time after time throughout the marriage, Arvay lashes out at Jim, accusing him of everything from killing their son to mocking her family. Rarely does she abide his ill-conceived jokes and childishness in silence. Her verbal attacks are imperfect weapons yet demonstrate her refusal to be vanquished altogether. “Her persistent attempts to preserve her integrity through withdrawal, resistance, and suspicion are

69 H.W. Brands’s article on American reverence for the Founding Fathers extrapolates Arvay’s experience more broadly. The end of Reconstruction, Brands explains, “occasioned a backward glance to an era when the country was united and Americans directed their anger and fire at foreigners.” H.W. Brands, “Founders Chic,” The Atlantic Monthly (September 2003) 106. 206 motivated by a tenacious belief in her own intrinsic worth and in her rights to individual freedom and social respect” (St. Clair 39). She even leaves Jim for several months early in the marriage, convinced that he abhors their afflicted first-born, Earl. After she returns, she learns to cultivate small pleasures, turning her porch into a retreat where she can read, sleep, and attain some much- needed self-confidence. When a telegram calls her home to her dying mother’s bedside, she calmly takes charge, comforting her mother, arranging the funeral, and keeping Larraine at bay, who with her husband Carl contrives to steal Arvay’s inheritance.

Perpetuating the Power System

In addition, although raised by tired, disinterested parents, Arvay brings up two bright, self-confident children of her own. Jim undermines even her parenting, however, often siding with the children against her until Kenny and Angie learn to privilege men’s voices over women’s. Arvay is powerless against such socialization, thus unwittingly perpetuating it in- and outside her home. White family dynamics are in fact a significant source of conflict in American race relations. “[T]he indictment of white women as racist is so prevalent in the thinking of most black people,” writes Gloria Wade-Gayles, “that even when white women put their lives on the line for black liberation, they are seen as the women who sleep with ‘the man,’ who give birth to new generations of ‘the man,’ and who socialize each new generation to take power” (7). As adults, Angie and Kenny recognize this power and use it to their advantage.

Angela and Hatton Howland prosper throughout their marriage, as his land development deals provide them with acres of pristine property and push African-American workers and families farther afield. “Arvay, from her seat on the front porch, watched the gangs of husky black roustabouts rumbling past in truck loads” (Seraph 195), considering the land’s 207

metamorphosis another of Hatton’s accomplishments. While the newly-wed Angie is initially

thrifty, making her own clothes and preserves, she soon “played tennis and golf, went in swimming, canoed and motor-boated with the rest, and talked about getting sun-tanned” (Seraph

197). Marriages built on African-American labor allow both white women a life of material ease.

The novel devotes greater attention to the Meserves’ son, Kenny, in whose decision to

become a jazz musician lies Hurston’s “suspicion of Western civilization and its machinery of

cultural appropriation” (Headon 31). Kenny is a young adult in the 1920s, the Jazz Age, eager to

drop out of college and earn his living through music. Arvay is skeptical. “I been hearing the

darkies picking boxes ever since I been old enough to know anything [. . .]. Just something for

fun,” she says (Seraph 202). Jim is more pragmatic, and just as unimaginative, relaying Kenny’s

reports that “white bands up North and in different places like New Orleans are taking over

darky music and making more money at it than the darkies used to” (Seraph 202). In fact, Jim

says, jazz is no longer black but American, distinguishing between the two and regarding one

more highly for its monetary potential. Several years later, Kenny calls from New Orleans to say

that a New York bandleader has hired him on. Along with music, whites subsume African-

American people, as Jim sends Joe Kelsey ahead to New York to serve as Kenny’s guardian.

“Don’t you worry none,” Joe says, leaving his own family behind. “We Meserves’ll look after one another” (Seraph 252) — Hurston’s jab at African-American complicity in the pet Negro system.70

Kenny’s call is disturbing for another reason as well. Just before the phone rings, Arvay

goes into the bathroom after a lengthy description of her bowel problems. Sitting on the toilet, 208

she hears Jim’s side of the phone conversation, the words “New Orleans” telling her that Kenny

is on the line. After straining for several minutes, “Arvay tried desperately to make it [to the

phone], but the click of the receiver found her scrambling to a standing position with her clothes

up around her waist” (Seraph 238). Only then does she learn of Kenny’s opportunity in New

York, and that Jim gave his blessing without bothering to consult her. As usual, Arvay

experiences a humiliating emotional and physical defeat.

Like others in the novel, the episode knits together female and racial degradation.

While Arvay’s predicament may stem partly from Hurston’s own intestinal ailments,71 its images

of restraint and release reflect not only Arvay’s unbalanced marriage but also America’s

exploitative race relations. Kenny’s exuberant account of his good fortune juxtaposed with his

mother’s trip to the bathroom presents white takeover of African-American art as so much shit.

Arvay brags about a successful bowel movement as Jim brags of Kenny’s theft of African-

American music. In his analysis of Seraph on the Suwanee, Chuck Jackson links Hurston’s

“white trash” narrative with the eugenics movement, for “the era of the Harlem Renaissance and

of modernism was also the era of eugenics” (Doyle qtd. in Jackson 642). As whites depict

African Americans as subhuman to justify their abuse of them, so they imagine certain whites as

“trashy,” low-class and unworthy of rights and opportunities. In the 1940s, class mobility

carried no “racial cognizance but rather engendered more insidious means of maintaining racial

boundaries and hierarchies” in both and white and black societies (Dubek 350). Middle- and

upper-class whites achieve material wealth at the expense of a moral center.

70 Campbell finds Hurston “satiric in her comments about Joe Kelsey as Jim’s pet negro [sic]. The satire, however, cuts in two directions: towards the white man who keeps a pet and the black man who so willingly fills that role” (135). 71 Hurston suffered from stomach and intestinal ailments for years, “possibly from fatigue and possibly from bacteria picked up on her travels” (Kaplan, Letters 168). 209

Jackson views Seraph as an anthropological work, for Hurston “uses racial whiteness as a

main-frame for this story so that she can treat dirt and trash as they correspond with differences

between (white) economic classes and between (white) genders” (644). Arvay’s missing a call from one of her “eugenically sound children [. . .] literalizes the excremental metaphor,” a

“double metaphor for her repression of both her poor white heritage and her experience with maternity” (649). Also at play is what Michael North calls the transfusion metaphor, which

“suggests that the role of African Americans is simply to make European Americans whole

again, drained as they have been by the effort of creating Western civilization” (127). So too is

Arvay drained, in more ways than one, the moment Kenny announces his new job and Jim

usurps her maternal authority. If the white woman is America’s princess whose “throne can be seen as an acceptance of her position within the racist social structure” (Dubek 345), Hurston

presents the multiple meanings of throne, leading in Arvay’s case not to the victory of release,

but to further discomfort and constraint. Her deluxe porch offers a vantage point from which to

view black labor; it is unsurprising, then, that in Hurston’s hands, it also encourages an

inconvenient churning of her bowels.

Arvay’s “Yessing”

Arvay’s married life continues its cycle of debasement until Jim presents her with an

ultimatum. Leaving for an extended outing with his fleet of shrimping boats, he informs her that

he will not come home unless she figures out what she wants. What he means, of course, is that 210

she must figure out what he wants.72 Only if she becomes the woman he expects her to be, that

is, reaches his point of view, can they reunite, and she has one year to do so. It is during Jim’s

absence that Arvay returns to Sawley to care for her dying mother, an experience prompting her

to return to Jim and comply with his demands for an emotionally and sexually accessible wife.

On the surface, Arvay appears to demean herself spectacularly. Hurston complicates matters,

however, unafraid to divulge women’s cooperation with patriarchal constructs.

Back in Sawley, Arvay is aghast at her family’s living conditions. During her marriage, feeling oppressed by Jim’s wealth, she had begun to consider her childhood poverty as virtuous, simple, “a state to be desired” (Seraph 272).73 Confronted again with rats and roaches, however,

she shudders to think that if not for Jim, she might be living this way still. Reaching under her

mother’s mattress, she retrieves an envelope containing her mother’s will, along with a glossy

photo of Kenny posing with his guitar. While touring, Kenny neglects his family, providing

them only with material objects reflecting his financial success. The ploy works. “ ‘This is

noble of Kenny, Mama,’” Arvay says, gazing at the picture. “Wasn’t it though? Never forgot

his old Grandma at all, up there with all them rich folks,’ ” Maria answers (Seraph 279). Arvay

too falls under the spell. Suddenly her beautiful home near the coast seems what Jim had always

meant it to be: compensation for emotional emptiness and justification for abuse.

Arvay finds her way to Jim’s boat with the help of Joe Kelsey’s son and daughter-in-law,

Jeff and Janie. Once on board, she watches Jim warily from a distance, careful not speak or do anything to upset him. When she does finally talk, her words emerge as a masterful display of

72 Lillie Howard thinks otherwise: “Then the husband,” she writes, “grown miserably tired of the constant bickering and tension, leaves his wife and waits for her to find herself.” Lillie P. Howard, “Marriage: Zora Neale Hurston’s System of Values,” CLA, 21.2 (1977) 267. Karla Holloway agrees that Jim “had not wanted to settle for only the outward shows of affection, care and concern without an inner devotion and commitment” (Holloway, The Character of the Word 61). I believe Jim’s constant silencing of Arvay’s voice and exploitation of her body refutes such impressions, however. 211 coquetry. She tells him he is brave, bold, smart, and noble, while batting her eyes and averting her glance, so daunting is his manliness. “ ‘You’se a monny-ark, Jim,’” she gushes, “ ‘and that’s something like a king, only bigger and better’” (Seraph 331).74 She meekly retreats to her cabin when ordered to do so, venturing out only when called. Her ultimate act of submission occurs during the novel’s last pages, when Jim finally comes to her cabin at night and reenacts their tired scenario of verbal abuse and physical force. As he drifts off to sleep, she wraps her arms around him and smiles, agreeable to her rightful place in life as Jim’s servant.

What appears to be Arvay’s self-dehumanization is her calculated means of survival. In over twenty years of marriage, she never cooed over Jim, never showered him with empty praise, never trailed after him at work to admire his actions. Her doing so now reveals her determination to seize what she wants, even if it means manipulating her spouse—the method

Jim has followed all along. As Gilbert and Gubar note of nineteenth-century women writers,

Arvay “cultivate[s] accents of acquiescence in order to gain freedom to live [her] life on [her] own terms” (Madwoman 74). After all these years, she realizes that “a woman is most powerful when she is weak” (Letters 562), or appears to be. Returning to Jim, Arvay not only escapes the sickness and poverty of Sawley, but also recovers the solitude of her home, vital to her spiritual well-being and made possible by Jim’s prolonged absences. Were she to divorce him, she would have to find one of the scarce low-paying jobs available to women at the time, for although Jim promises to provide her with an allowance, he has repeatedly shown his inability and unwillingness to keep his word. Were she to marry again, she would likely wind up back where

73 White poverty “appears here as a falsely inflated myth lacking empowerment, thriving instead on resentment and a sense of inadequacy” (Konzett, “Getting in Touch” 136). 74 Arvay’s sentence repeats almost verbatim a line from one of Hurston’s own letters. Writing to scholar William Stanley Hoole on March 7, 1936, Hurston expresses her pleasure “that the south is taking a new high place in American literature. [. . .] T.S. STribling [sic] is a monnyark,” she says, “thats [sic] something like a king you know, only bigger and better. I love him” (Letters 367-8)—words of praise inverted, when spoken by Arvay, to soothe Jim’s ego. 212

she started: oppressed and degraded by an autocrat. Instead, she returns to familiar territory,

prepared to placate Jim and salvage whatever material and psychological spoils her long

marriage provides. Perhaps “Arvay’s surrender can be read as tragic—as a forced conclusion—

for the limitations of her time and space leave her little place to go except her husband” (duCille,

Coupling Convention 141). Nevertheless she lulls Jim into acquiescence, while he remains too

self-absorbed to realize it.

More Violence

Life on the boat exhibits the violence underpinning patriarchal relationships. As the crew

cast their nets, Arvay watches them haul myriad creatures on board. She looks with pity on the

“soft-bodied” things, among them “four octopi, about four feet across” who “bent their arms like

swastikas” (Seraph 335). The same day, a huge silver shark is heaved on deck. “With shouts of vengeful joy, the three men fell upon it with the axe, shovel, and gig. [. . .] When it lay still

again, they hacked through the tough hide and ripped open the belly. Arvay ran outside to see

what they were looking at with so much interest. There were little live sharks inside inclosed

[sic] in transparent sacs” (Seraph 338). Dumping the mess overboard, the men are dismayed to

see the baby sharks escape and swim free. With vivid, bloody similes and imagery, particularly

resonant in a post-war publication, Hurston depicts atrocities committed against women,

mothers, and nature.

Arvay has no choice but to play it safe on board, considering she is the lone woman amid

daily orgies of male violence.75 She handles herself with aplomb, ingratiating herself with the

75 Meisenhelder, on the other hand, finds Arvay complicit in the shrimp boat’s culture of violence. “Given the values associated with the sea-depths and with shrimping,” she writes, “Arvay here expresses her acceptance of the aggressive, rapacious behavior that has characterized white males in the novel and her willingness now to support their subjugation of ‘soft-bodied things’” (112). 213

crew and earning their gratitude by cooking meals and staying out of the way. Janet St. Clair

views Arvay’s actions as her “final expansive assertion of feminine authority and maternal

power,” with a “dimension of heroism that transcends Janie Starks’s final withdrawal to the

isolated confines of her upstairs room” (40). Additionally, Arvay’s language at Seraph’s

conclusion reflects Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of double-voiced discourse, in turn relating to

African-American masking and feather-bed resistance: “not saying what one means and saying

what one does not mean are common techniques for conveying antagonistic or subversive

intentions” (St. Clair 40). Were Jim to listen to Arvay carefully, he would see through her

posturing. He has never listened to her, however. Rather, he has spent their marriage alternately

silencing her voice or hearing only what he wants to hear, and her trickery goes undetected.

Arvay’s method echoes Hurston’s in Dust Tracks on a Road, in which statements “are qualified

and calculated to diminish hurt, create an emotionally imperturbable persona, and foster a

positive self-perception in the face of rejection and powerlessness” (Plant 15).

Arvay’s exhaustive rationalizing of her marriage emphasizes just how distorted it is.

Therein lies Hurston’s critique of America’s sexual and racial tableaux. Both are inequitable,

humiliating, and fearsome, glossed over by duplicity and the privileging of fiscal gain above human dignity. Jim Meserve is Jim Crow, lording over his wife and workers with violence, keeping them ignorant and dependent under the guise of easygoing benevolence. He is one of countless “thrifty and avaricious Yankees” participating in the “industrial exploitation of the

New South” (Du Bois 138) and the sexual and emotional exploitation of women. Whether

Arvay ultimately triumphs over Jim remains open to speculation; there is little reason to believe the pattern of their life will change, and the specter of rape still haunts the narrative. Yet the

“new, improved Arvay” has attained self-knowledge, along with “some of the deviousness and 214 duplicity” women require to survive within patriarchy (duCille, Coupling Convention 139). In the end, she gets what she wants. Rocking Jim in her arms, she likens him to “Kenny when he wore diapers” (Seraph 351), attributing to him all the mentality and control of an infant. Instead of shame and fear, she feels powerful and intelligent, displacing Jim’s authority with her own. 215

Conclusion

Throughout the preceding chapters, I have attempted to highlight the dialogic

correspondences among racially, culturally, and socially disparate modern women writers and

their works, without ignoring the distinctions among them or minimizing the pressures unique to

their lives. As “Hurston suggests that racial meaning is a highly contextualized affair” (Carr and

Cooper 293), women’s identity, or their perception of their identity, is highly contextualized

also. I do, however, view each writer’s primary objective as writing women into selfhood.

Paramount in the novels of Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Nella Larsen, and

Zora Neale Hurston is the urgency for women to establish themselves amid patriarchal traditions

that would otherwise erase them. Within power structures reliant upon physical manifestations

of prowess—industrialization, colonization, and bodily restrictions on African Americans,

women, and the poor, modernist women writers construct discourses reflecting the need for

female agency and individuality.

In each of the novels, marriage irrevocably affects women’s identity, as they continually

adjust to and manipulate conventional marital expectations. Female characters experiencing

poverty, bigotry, emotional sterility, or confused sexual identity often become further alienated

within the traditional social structure of marriage, which is incapable of accommodating

nontraditional sensibilities. Pervasive in each work, then, is women’s palpable sense of outsidership. They fear, and undergo, emotional and physical emptiness, thwarting their ability to weave together the various narrative threads of their lives. Examining together Clarissa

Dalloway, Sasha Jansen, Angela Murray, Irene Redfield, and Arvay Meserve, among others, asserts a broader modernism in which comparable narrative impulses eradicate artificial 216

boundaries, particularly those between women of different backgrounds and between African-

American and Anglo literary traditions.

Jeanette McVicker and Kristina Deffenbacher are among scholars reconceiving

modernism by linking together Anglo women writers and women writers of color. In

“Dislocating the Discourse of Modernism: The Examples of Woolf and Hurston,” McVicker

finds both women responding to their marginality in their narratives, effecting a “genuine

alteration of the terrain of social representation” (317). Additionally, McVicker would bring the

Harlem Renaissance further into assessments of the modernist period to understand modernism’s

complex political implications.1 In “Modernism, Power and the Elite: Teaching Woolf and

Hurston Together,” McVicker sees affinities between Woolf and Hurston’s “pointed socio-

political critique within narratives of skillful beauty” (279) and encourages her students to

consider the dynamics of margins, centers, gender, and race in modern women’s literature.

In her essay “Woolf, Hurston, and the House of Self,” Kristina Deffenbacher reads Mrs.

Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, and Their Eyes Were Watching God alongside one another to

clarify each writer’s concept of the self as defined by domestic space and material barriers. She

also compares Delia Jones in Hurston’s short story “Sweat” to the women Woolf describes in

Room, all of whom are subject to men’s jurisdiction. Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd similarly

notes, “ ‘Sweat’ makes it clear [. . .] that Hurston placed great value on a woman’s ability to

work and to become financially independent” (138), also connecting Hurston and Woolf’s

predominant concerns.

1 In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Houston A. Baker, Jr., also questions the absence or disregard of African-American writers in modernist studies. Charles Chesnutt and Booker T. Washington, for example, engaged in “the mastery of the minstrel mask by blacks that constitutes a primary move in Afro-American discursive modernisms” (17). African-American writers who seem to adopt high modernist techniques are also mastering form to garner recognition from white audiences while talking back and black, to borrow bell hooks’s phrasing. Mastery of form, in other words, is a strategy that “ensures cognitive exploration and affective transformation leading to the growth and survival of a nation” (37). 217

Although their narratives focus upon discrete spaces and places, such as London or black

Harlem, the writers in my study were well read and well traveled, attuned to the shifting

psychological and geographical coordinates of their time. As Jeanette McVicker states, “we as

critical readers must continually keep in mind that a writer’s textual practices cannot be separated from other competing historical discourses” (“Dislocating” 314). Rhys’s women

oscillate between the European cities in which she herself lived. The artist colonies of 1920s

Paris, for instance, influence her work, as noted in Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank.

Hurston, Fauset, and Larsen worked in proximity during the Harlem Renaissance, and Woolf,

along with creating her own fiction, reviewed her predecessors and read voraciously among her

contemporaries.2 If they did not know each other personally or always see eye-to-eye, modern

women writers were aware of others engaging in similar endeavors. “Complexity and diversity

are no longer a national preserve,” Elaine Showalter states of contemporary British women’s

novels, set all over the globe (A Literature of Their Own 322). Nor are they racial or cultural

preserves, with transatlantic modern women’s novels revelatory of changing social landscapes.

Earlier female writers consider marriage also, such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and

Frances Watkins Harper, generally introducing marriage at novel’s end as the culmination of

their stories. They alternately satirize courtship and the notion of marriage as women’s destiny or propound the personal and professional advantages afforded to women who marry well.

Modernist women writers, on the other hand, rather than explore the events leading to marriage, delve into the mechanics of marriage itself or its aftermath in divorce or widowhood. As Sandra

Gilbert and Susan Gubar find:

when we focus not only on women’s increasingly successful struggle for

2 Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader: First Series (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932) contain essays on Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, the Duchess of Newcastle, and Dorothy Osborne, while her 218

autonomy in the years from, say, 1880 to 1920, but also on their increasingly

successful production of literary texts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, we find ourselves confronting an entirely different modernism. And

it is a modernism constructed not just against the grain of Victorian male precursors,

not just in the shadow of a shattered God, but as an integral part of a complex

response to female precursors and contemporaries. (No Man’s Land, Vol. I 156)

While it may seem incongruous for innovative women writers to work the traditional subject of marriage into their novels, they had no alternative if they wished to portray the experiences of early twentieth-century women. Single women had limited access to remunerative jobs, while those who were married generally stayed at home and occupied themselves with housework and children. In either situation, women remained financially dependent on others, usually men, and vulnerable to constant scrutiny from employers, landladies, husbands, or servants. Women had to try to form an identity amid adverse circumstances to avoid being entirely subsumed by them.

Male modernists cast a different light upon such circumstances, as seen in their own

literary representations of marriage. They too depict marital complications, yet in many of their

works, women undermine men’s sense of privilege and superiority through deception or freakish

physical might. Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to

name several, portray men brought low by marriages and liaisons with faithless women. In

Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), women are instinctively cruel.3 John Dowell watches

diaries and letters mention her readings of Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West, among others. 3 In the first volume of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Gilbert and Gubar describe The Good Soldier as a “moral maze,” “a labyrinth of sex antagonisms” in which its author’s characterizations of women seem to controvert his own frequently expressed feminist leanings” (29). 219

helplessly as his wife conducts her extramarital affairs; emasculated, Dowell plays the role of

nurse to several of the novel’s women. Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich’s affair in

Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920) concludes with Gerald wandering in despair into the Alps to

die, finally vanquished by Gudrun’s psychological and physical ferocity. Leopold Bloom in

Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is shamed yet titillated by his wife’s infidelities, fantasizing about her

with other men and pimping her among his friends. Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the

Night (1934) tries to control his beautiful young psychiatric patient by marrying her, only to

watch his scheme backfire under his wife’s gathering strength of mind. Marked most profoundly

by women’s bodies, marriage in many Anglo modern men’s novels becomes a physical entity in

and of itself.

In works by African-American male writers of the time, the entity assumes a different

shape, encompassing the bigotry dictating the well being of husbands, wives, and children.

Darwin Turner notes the grievous threats upon African-American men’s and especially women’s

bodies as foregrounding Toomer’s narratives in Cane (1923).4 “Throughout his writing and his

teaching,” Turner states, “Toomer emphasized the importance of liberating women from the

restrictions imposed by society” (xiv). In Flight (1926), his novel of a mulatta woman passing

for white, Walter White contemplates patriarchal oppression of women and men in terms

resonant with Nella Larsen’s in Quicksand and Theodor Adorno’s in The Culture Industry.

According to one of the novel’s characters, “ ‘All the old virtues of comradeship and art and literature and philosophy, in short, all the refinements of life, are being swallowed up in this monster, the Machine, we are creating, which is slowly but surely making us mere automatons, dancing like marionettes when the machine pulls the strings and bids us prance’” (54). Matriarch

Mrs. Morgan in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry ruins her family by obsessing over a 220 physical trait, skin color. Her behavior is not the willful perversion of Anglo male modernists’ female characters but a manifestation of color prejudice wrought by white racism. Women in the works of African-American male modernists respond to prejudiced notions of African-American bodies.

Females in modern women’s fiction are also characterized physically, at times erotically, but more often their bodies signify absence and lack rather than overabundance and vigor. The

Dalloway, Smith, and Redfield marriages are chaste; Rhys’s women are thin and listless; women in Fauset and Larsen often repress their sexuality; and Arvay Meserve is sexually abused and cripplingly self-conscious. The irrepressible sensuality that modern male writers perceive in women—such as Molly Bloom, lounging in bed amid crumbs and the imprint on the sheets of her latest lover’s body—is the apparatus driving many of their narratives. Ironically, of course, each male writes out of a society intent on suppressing women’s physicality, their sexuality especially; such suppression becomes a key subject of modern women’s novels. Examining the modernist works of both sexes would unveil women and men’s different perceptions of their roles and goals in marriage. I imagine such a study as diminishing rather than fortifying another false binary, locating points of intersection between bodies and minds, physical traits and articulated discourses.

Woolf, Rhys, Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston portray married women’s means of inventing themselves when male-oriented definitions of womanhood fail them. From imaginary knuckle- dusters to feather-bed resistance, a private and protected consciousness to exaggerated compliance, modernist female characters variously assert their selfhood, either clashing with society’s ideologies or trying to fulfill them. I concur with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that canon

4 See Turner’s introduction to Cane. 221

formation originates with arbitrary political divisions of people into races.5 Read together, then, the novels of Anglo and African-American modern women writers prompt a reconceptualization of literary modernism, one that moves marginalized writers of color to the forefront and responds to the concerns among writers attentive to women’s identity formation during the modernist period.

5 See Gates’s Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 222

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