Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, Z

SHE HAS RISEN:

DECIPHERING THE MEANING OF CHRISTIANITY IN THREE AFRICAN-

AMERICAN BILDUNGSROMANE: HARRIET WILSON’S OUR NIG, ZORA NEALE

HURSTON’S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, AND ALICE WALKER’S THE

COLOR PURPLE

A Thesis

Presented to the faculty of the Department of English

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

(Literature)

Christophe Chalaye

SPRING 2017

Christophe Chalaye

SHE HAS RISEN:

DECIPHERING THE MEANING OF CHRISTIANITY IN THREE AFRICAN-

AMERICAN BILDUNGSROMANE: HARRIET WILSON’S OUR NIG, ZORA NEALE

HURSTON’S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, AND ALICE WALKER’S THE

COLOR PURPLE

A Thesis

Christophe Chalaye

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Susan Wanlass, Ph.D.

______, Second Reader Nancy Sweet, Ph.D.

______Date iii

Student: Christophe Chalaye

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______Doug Rice, Ph.D. Date

Department of English

Abstract

SHE HAS RISEN:

DECIPHERING THE MEANING OF CHRISTIANITY IN THREE AFRICAN-

AMERICAN BILDUNGSROMANE: HARRIET WILSON’S OUR NIG, ZORA NEALE

HURSTON’S THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, AND ALICE WALKER’S THE

COLOR PURPLE

Christophe Chalaye

This thesis will argue that Our Nig, The Color Purple, and Their Eyes Were

Watching God are not only unique simply for being a bildungsroman of which a black woman is a focal point, but also, because Christianity plays an important role in each novel, and because each novel’s protagonist must contend with two forms of oppression – that is, sexism on top of racism – Frado, Celie, and Janie (from Our Nig, The Color

Purple, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, respectively) are suffering exceedingly, and are therefore struggling to discover an answer to that timeless question: what is

oppressed almost exclusively by patriarchy; for Janie, “god” is found not in any ancient text, but in nature. Finally, Celie is oppressed by both patriarchy and racism. Moreover, for Celie, God is not oppressive so much as He is absent; He is a deity who, due to having been reconceptualized as a white male, and therefore a representative of patriarchy. Consequently, Celie, like Janie before her, and with the invaluable aid of her friend, Shug, not only adopts an Emersonian perspective of God, but also explicitly acknowledges that God need not be her opposite – that is, a white male. For this reason, I suggest that The Color Purple is the most complete bildungsroman of the three texts that will be discussed.

______, Committee Chair Susan Wanlass, Ph.D.

______Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To the love of my life, Toni, without whose unending patience and encouragement this project would never have come to fruition. To my parents, for their continuous support.

And to my son, who has shown me the true meaning tenacity and has enhanced my perspective of this life. It is in you that I am learning the virtue of faith, and that faith is, indeed, a virtue.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………………vii

Chapter

1. An Overview…...…………………………………………………..…………………...…1

2. Frado’s Inability to Decipher Christianity’s Meaning in Our Nig………………………… 26

3. Celie’s Transcendence of Christianity in The Color Purple………....…….…….55

4. Janie’s Emersonianism in Their Eyes Were Watching God………….…………..84

5. Works Cited…………………………………………………………………….103

viii 1

Chapter 1: An Overview

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

This essay will examine three African-American female bildungsromane: Harriet

E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

(1937), and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). I argue that each novel is not only unique simply for being a bildungsroman of which a black woman is a focal point (a genuine rarity in the genre), but also, because Christianity plays an important role in each novel, and because each novel’s protagonist must contend with two forms of oppression – that is, sexism on top of racism – Frado, Celie, and Janie (from Our Nig, The Color

Purple, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, respectively) are suffering exceedingly, and are therefore struggling to discover an answer to that timeless question: what is

Christianity, and how should it be interpreted? Frado, who is a victim of racist ideology masquerading as Christianity – for Mrs. Bellmont, her tormentor, regularly exploits biblical passages to justify her mistreatment – never comes across an answer to this query. Janie, a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is, unlike her literary antecedent, oppressed almost exclusively by patriarchy; for Janie, “god” is found not in any ancient text, but in nature. Finally, Celie is oppressed by both patriarchy and racism. Moreover, for Celie, God is not oppressive so much as He is absent; He is a deity who, due to having been reconceptualized as a white male, and therefore a representative of patriarchy. Consequently, Celie, like Janie before her, and with the invaluable aid of her friend, Shug, not only adopts an Emersonian perspective of God, but also explicitly

2 acknowledges that God need not be her opposite – that is, a white male. For this reason, I suggest that The Color Purple is the most complete bildungsroman of the three texts that will be discussed. It should be noted that this paper does not propose to denounce, nor even condescend to, Christianity, but merely to point out that Christianity, as an ideological construct, is interpretively malleable. Just as Mrs. Bellmont warps and twists biblical tenets to suit her malice, victims of that same malice can interpret those tenets as a vehicle for spiritual guidance. Certainly, history and literature alike are filled with black women, such as Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Jacobs, for whom Christianity was not only a source of comfort, but also served as a medium with which to subvert and combat social injustice. It should also be noted that, when talking about a given bildungsroman, a

“bildung,” in the context of this essay, insinuates a character’s spiritual development, unless stated elsewise.

Compared to their animal ancestors, humans possess the privilege – or curse, depending on how one looks at it – of a superior cognitive prowess, which leads to an ability as well as a desire to develop morally, intellectually, or spiritually. But, in what may be one of life’s most perplexing paradoxes, our most profound moments of development arise from moments of equally profound suffering. Thus, suffering is a prerequisite to spiritual development. It may be because all humans have undergone suffering, and most people have a need to better themselves as they wade through the sometimes seemingly impassable mires of life, that Christianity – in addition to the thousands of other religions currently in existence – is an ideological construct to which countless disciples cling. Christianity offers succor, like an ideological salve on a

3 psychological wound; it provides answers to unanswerable inquiries, such as: why are good men made to suffer? Even if no clear answer presents itself, Christians, who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, obtain relief in any knowledge of His suffering.

Furthermore, the Bible – that ancient text by which Christianity is reified – operates like a divinely inspired handbook on how one could interpret his or her own suffering and develop accordingly. For instance, a popular verse amongst American slaves can be found in Exodus, in which God is described as “hearing” the pleas of the enslaved

Israelites and in which He displays “concern”: “The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with

Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them” (Exodus 2:23-25).

Albert Raboteau, in his exquisite work, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African

Americans, elucidates why Exodus was a book of special significance to African-

American slaves: “Exodus proved that slavery was against God’s will and that slavery would end someday. … Moreover, the notion that blacks were inferior to whites was disproved by Exodus, which taught the slaves that they, like the Israelites of old, were a special people, chosen by God for deliverance” (Raboteau 44). Unfortunately, to the detriment of many in nineteenth-century America, the Bible was interpreted to be an explicit advocate of patriarchy and even slavery (examples of which will be given in chapter two). Yet, it is a testament to Christianity’s interpretive malleability that

Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped slave, rigorously upheld his belief that the average American slave owner who reads the Bible as a textual legitimizer of

4 institutionalized suffering is, in actuality, misreading it, or is, even worse, a Tartuffe:

“‘Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and inequity.’ Dark and terrible as is this picture, I hold it to be strictly true of the overwhelming mass of professed Christians in America” (Douglass 108, emphasis my own).

In taking it upon themselves to explore the myriad ways in which a person can develop, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists spawned a new literary genre: the bildungsroman. The word “bildungsroman” is German in origin, and can be translated to

“formation” (bildung) and “novel” (roman). The term was coined by a philologist named

Johann Karl von Morgenstern (1770 – 1852), in an 1819 lecture, which he called Über das Wesen des Bildungsromans, but was not popularized until it was used by German philosopher and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 – 1941), who employed the word in his 1870 book, Das Leben Schleiermachers, in which he defines bildungsroman as a genre unto itself (Maier 318). The first academic work to concentrate solely on the bildungsroman was Susanne Howe’s Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen (1930), although “Bildungsroman would still not appear in English-language dictionaries or literary handbooks until the 1950s” (Fraiman 4). The most influential modern (post

1970) analysis of the bildungsroman genre has been, for better or worse, Jerome

Buckley’s Season of Youth, which was published in January of 1974. In it, Buckley maintains that, for a novel to qualify as a bildungsroman, its protagonist must pass through all but “two or three” of the following phases: “Childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love,

[and] the search for a vocation and a working philosophy” (Buckley 18). In the ensuing decades since the release of Season of Youth, many scholars have deemed Buckley’s approach to categorizing the bildungsroman to be excessively taxonomic, exclusionary, and male-centric. Buckley demonstrates this latter quality by promulgating that, in order for a hero’s narrative to be a valid as a bildungsroman, that hero must have, “At least two love affairs or sexual encounters, one debasing, one exalting, and demands that in this respect the hero reappraise his values. By the time he has decided … he has left his adolescence behind and entered upon his maturity” (Buckley 17). This criterion is enough to disqualify women from being bildungsroman heroines, since women could not so casually engage in multiple sexual liaisons without fear of repercussion, and particularly in Victorian society, wherein a woman’s honor – an attribute that was gauged most heavily by her chastity – would help to make her an “Angel of her House,” which was the preferred of two allotted spaces in society (the other being the “fallen woman,” a status upon which I will expound in chapter two). In his essay, appropriately titled The Double

Standard, Keith Thomas observes, “When men took liberties, women had to be educated to tolerate them, and in the great mass of didactic literature for young ladies one of the main themes was that women should recognize that the double standard was in the nature of things” (Thomas 196). Indeed, the sexual double standard that existed during

Victoria’s reign (and beyond) was bad enough, but for a literary scholar to promote this same double standard nearly one hundred years after Victoria’s death is nothing short of egregious.

In addition, Buckley dedicates only one chapter to a female bildungsroman – The

Mill on the Floss (1860) – and even here Buckley argues that the main bildung element is found in Tom Tulliver, rather than the more central protagonist, Maggie – and most of his qualifying criteria were not applicable to Victorian-era women. For instance, Buckley avers that a bildungsroman hero initiates his quest for knowledge by, “[leaving] the repressive atmosphere of home … to make his way independently in the city” (Buckley

17). In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), possibly the prototypical white woman’s bildungsroman, the titular heroine, while a prisoner under a repressive roof as a child, does not choose to leave her home so much as she is sent away; what’s worse, Frado from Our Nig is, as a black woman, not permitted to leave at all, but is forced to endure

Buckley’s aforesaid “repressive atmosphere,” which, in turn, hinders her ability to develop spiritually, or to achieve bildung.

Though “bildungsroman,” as a word, has been a part of academia’s lexicon for almost two hundred years, academics have debated about the genre’s parameters for practically that same amount of time. If earlier scholars of the genre, such as Howe, G.B.

Tennyson, and Buckley, overlooked innumerable female bildungsromane, then even less attention was devoted to African American bildungsromane. In so doing, these scholars revealed inadvertently a deeply embedded racial and gender bias. Such omissions have become apparent only in retrospect, primarily because, for nearly thirty years, a profusion of novels whose protagonists are either racial minorities or women have been accepted as bildungsromane (such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible

Man). Almost paradoxically, this increased inclusivity has made it more, not less,

7 difficult for critics to accurately delineate the parameters of the bildungsroman as a genre. Etymologically, the German word “bild” means, “picture”; “bildung,” therefore, means the formation of a picture. Thus, a “bildungsroman” paints a literary picture of a person’s formation. But what, specifically, is “formation” supposed to connote? Indeed, as the inclusion of African American and female bildungsromane has evinced,

“formation,” or development, has different meanings to different people at different times. Though it is considered a pioneering study of the bildungsroman genre, Howe’s

Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen fails to clarify or specify what type of development a literary protagonist must experience in order for his or her narrative to adequately qualify as a bildungsroman: “[The bildungsroman is] a novel of all-round development or self-culture [that features] the more or less conscious attempt on the part of the hero to integrate his powers, to cultivate himself by his experience” (Howe 5).

Through this passage, it is plain that Howe’s language is vague at best (all-round development) and male-centric at worst (integrate his powers), thereby forcing successive generations of literary scholars to conduct deeper investigative analyses.

Such analyses have led to the bildungsroman being divided into several subgenres: the erziehungsroman, in which an emphasis is placed on a youth’s systemized training or formal schooling (such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile); the künstlerroman, or a tale of the orientation of an artist (of which James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the best example); and the entwicklungsroman, a narrative, usually autobiographical, in which a character’s spiritual development clashes with his or her intellectual development (going by this definition, one could easily label

Wilson’s Our Nig as an entwicklungsroman; even so, for reasons of continuity, we will continue to think of Wilson’s text as a member of that broader genre under which it is more customarily categorized: the bildungsroman). In Appearing to Diminish, Lorna Ellis attests for this need to branch the bildungsroman into a variety of subgenres: “There has been remarkably little agreement on which novels constitute the Bildungsroman canon, in

Germany or in England” (Ellis 22). Nonetheless, it is worth that noting that, of the aforementioned bildungsroman subgenres, none are gender or race specific, demonstrating that critics, in their endless pursuit of the “perfect” bildungsroman definition, have, perhaps ironically, ignored the developmental processes of a large number of literary characters. Fortunately, this exclusion of women and minorities is being remedied by contemporary feminists like Laura Pressman, who is acutely aware that “development” of any sort has had, historically, two very dissimilar implications for males and females – particularly during the Victorian era, a period during which the social dichotomization of the sexes was taken to an utmost extremity – as is, consequently, campaigning for the advent of a new, feminine-centered bildungsroman subgenre, the frauenroman: “The existence of the female bildungsroman genre – sometimes called the frauenroman – has been debated amongst scholars and feminists alike with a blurred resolution” (Pressman).

In spite of such classifying, however, literary scholars have not come any closer to answering that misleadingly simple inquiry: what is a bildungsroman? After all, if

“bildungsroman” translates to “novel of formation,” why should not any novel, such as

The Scarlet Letter or Moby-Dick – that is, any narrative in which a character arc is

9 present – count as a bildungsroman? As Kelsey L. Bennett informs us, “In addition to the comparative lateness of the term’s entry into the discourse of English-speaking critics is the challenge of its notorious resistance to precise translation” (Bennett 93). To help solve this riddle, we should turn to Dilthey’s original definition, which states that a bildungsroman hero is one who engages in the double task of self-integration and integration into society. This is why Dilthey regarded Johnann Wolfgang von Goethe’s

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) to be the prototypical bildungsroman, as its eponymous male integrates himself into a business setting (by accepting an apprenticeship), and, in his journey, receives an enhanced comprehension of his own self

(that he was meant to be an artist, not a businessman). Susan Fraiman, in her wonderful book, Unbecoming Women, corroborates this point: “Dilthey offered what has become the most frequently cited definition of the [bildungsroman]. Most important, in both 1870 and 1906 he yoked the bildungsroman firmly to Goethe’s 1795 novel, Wilhelm Meister’s

Lehrjahre” (Fraiman 3). Unsurprisingly, Dilthey’s genre precedent all but disregards any narrative ingredient required to foster the spiritual development of women and racial minorities, ordinary denizens for whom no “apprenticeship” – that is, a position through which to better integrate themselves into society – existed. Dilthey’s successors – namely, Howe, Tennyson, and Buckley – do nothing to dispute Dilthey’s claim that

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship laid all genre groundwork upon which all succeeding entries have built. Thus, until recently, it has always been presumed that Wilhelm

Meister’s Apprenticeship is the prototypical bildungsroman. (This helps to explain why so many novels that were published prior to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, such as

Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders [1722], Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue

Rewarded [1740], and Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady [1748], novels which were led by females, and which possess multiple characteristics of a bildungsroman, are overlooked as such.)

Intriguingly, it is perhaps this increasing diversity within the bildungsroman genre

– that is, the inclusion of novels about women and racial minorities – that is causing a greater quantity of literary scholars to test the heretofore unexamined belief that Wilhelm

Meister’s Apprenticeship is, in fact, the original bildungsroman. While the bulk of scholars, it seems, continue to stand by Dilthey, a growing minority who feel that the bildungsroman originated even before Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship are making themselves heard. Timo Müller is among this minority: “Though Wilhelm Meister is still widely regarded as the first bildungsroman, the genre actually originates some years earlier with the publication of Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser [in 1785]” (Müller 32).

Some literary scholars insist that the lineage of the bildungsroman can be traced back even further, to Voltaire’s Candide; or, All for the Best (1759). Whether the bildungsroman began with Wilhelm Meister, Anton Reiser, or Candide, discerning readers will be quick to see that all three of these characters have in common two physical traits: they are each of them white and male. Thus, these men endeavor to achieve bildung because their race and gender has historically allowed them to do so.

While some male critics continue to debate about which novel about a white male deserves acknowledgment for being the original bildungsroman, Ellis boldly subverts the unspoken assumption that the original bildungsroman was even male by asserting that

Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), whose protagonist is female, was actually the first bildungsroman. What’s more, Ellis writes that this bildungsroman came about as a result of eighteenth-century society’s increasingly alienating attitude towards women: “The [sense of] alienation found in the female

Bildungsroman … is crucial to my revised history of the genre. … It is perhaps precisely due to this sense of alienation that the female Bildungsroman appeared before the first established male manifestations of the genre” (Ellis 38). Ellis’s postulation that the initial bildungsroman contains a female hero is vital for the genre’s continuing racial and gender inclusivity. Moreover, it reminds us that genre, like Christianity (or even ideology as a whole), is but a human-made construct, and is, therefore, not only subjective, but also interpretively malleable; that is, it can be tailored to accommodate the ideologies of the person by whom it is analyzed and critiqued. For the bildungsroman in particular, the very vagueness of the bildungsroman is what lends to its interpretive malleability.

At this point, it becomes obvious that, just as “bildungsroman” is conceptually indistinct, tracking the origin of this mystifying genre is a similar exercise in ambiguity.

This is why, for the purposes of this thesis, the meaning of bildungsroman will be narrowed from “novel of formation” to merely “novel of spiritual formation.” To adopt this perspective of a bildungsroman is to take a page from Dilthey, who contests that

Wilhelm Meister’s titular job title is as much of a spiritual metaphor as it is a literal admission into a domain of business and professionalism; hence, “apprenticeship” is but a creative euphemism for “bildung.” As the title of his book, Principle and Propensity:

Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth Century, suggests, Bennett strives to connect a

12 given literary character’s religiosity with his or her bildung: “By looking at self- formation first as a religious practice … I hope to show that for both women and men, forming selfhood has as much to do with one’s metaphysics as it does with one’s relation to others in the world” (Bennett 94). Bennett also emphasizes that the definition of bildungsroman found in the Oxford English Dictionary remarks upon its spiritual as well as its secular dimensions: “[A] novel that has as its main theme the formative years or spiritual education of one person” (OED). Thus, it appears that critics, regardless of their disagreement as to how a bildungsroman may be distinguished, have reached, at the very least, some consensus that spirituality plays a substantial role in the development of a bildungsroman protagonist. For Frado, Janie, and Celie, spirituality – Christian spirituality, in particular – is part of their very being; yet, their faith does little to ameliorate their adverse circumstances, or ease their sufferings, which is why, to achieve bildung, these three women must progress beyond traditional Christianity, to a more personalized, and therefore depatriarchalized, spiritual realm.

Female-led novels that have been inducted into the bildungsroman canon, such as

Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

(1868), were, while commercially successful and critically acclaimed, comparatively fewer in number (when compared to their male counterparts). Scarcer still was the

African-American male bildungsroman, a sub-genre of which only a handful of titles in nineteenth-century America and England could claim to be members (such examples include Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave and Olaudah Equiano’s

The Interesting Narrative). Rarest of all was the African-American female

13 bildungsroman, the number of titles for which could be, in the nineteenth century, dwindled down to two: William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter

(1853), and Wilson’s Our Nig. If a pattern of increasing scarcity can be detected, it is because white men have faced, by far, the least amount of socioeconomic oppression. In contrast, black men and white women were each oppressed by a respective ideological construct; the former was susceptible to oppression by racism, whilst the latter was susceptible to patriarchy. Black women, on the other hand, were susceptible to oppression by both, making them, aside from perhaps the Native American, the most subjugated of domestic social groups. This is not to intimate spiritual development was a privilege reserved solely for white men or people of means, but merely that, for such individuals, spiritual and moral development could be experienced with comparatively minimal suffering. Conversely, suffering – be it psychological or physical – was, for black women, almost synonymous with bildung, as the latter generally transpired in the midst of the former. The scene in which Frado realizes that she can defend herself from

Mrs. Bellmont’s attacks serves as a perfect exemplum of this argument: “[Frado] did not know, before, that she had a power to ward off assaults. Her triumph in seeing [Mrs.

Bellmont] enter the door with her burden, repaid her for much of her former suffering”

(Wilson 58-59). Hence, humans may share an equal capability for spiritual development, but opportunities for spiritual development have not always been parceled out equitably; white women receive fewer opportunities than their male complements, and African

Americans receive fewer opportunities still (Frado, for example, is admonished by Mrs.

Bellmont for attending church).

Because black women have been subjected two layers of oppression, they have also, unsurprisingly, endured, as a collective whole, staggering amounts of suffering, be it from being separated from their families, abused physically or sexually by their overseers, or by being overworked. It is this very suffering that distinguishes black female bildungsromane from most of their white counterparts. This is not to suggest that white bildungsromane protagonists do not suffer – suffering is, lest it be forgotten, a prerequisite to spiritual development – but merely that the kinds of suffering undergone by such characters as Pip from Great Expectations (1960) – namely, unrequited love – come across as trivial when compared to being violated sexually or feeling a rawhide whip’s unremitting sting. From Mrs. Bellmont’s daily beatings of Frado in Our Nig to

Celie’s graphic retelling of her rapes in The Color Purple, black female bildungsromane are awash in vivid portrayals of physical and psychological pain; to be sure, black female bildungsromane remind us that suffering is a phenomenon that has no boundary and knows no limit. But it is not the presence of suffering alone that makes black female bildungsromane unique amongst fellow entries of its genre, but the fact that black women are compelled to develop spiritually and morally in spite of so much suffering. This also differentiates a black female bildungsroman from its male equivalent, as escape from slavery was much more common for men such as Douglass, who not only fled from his captivity, but also was able to proceed in his bildung as a free citizen. Because escape was much less likely for women, any possibility of bildung necessitated either an influence foreign to their immediate environment, such as Shug Avery from The Color

Purple, or a fortuitous occurrence, such as the sudden illness and ensuing demise of

Janie’s domineering and abusive husband in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Even if a woman was able to venture on her own into society, as Frado ultimately does, there was little to sustain, let alone guarantee, her survival. As Wilson illustrates in Our Nig, employment opportunities for women – black or white – were incredibly scarce. Thus, for a lone black man like Douglass, to be free meant improved chances for bildung; for a lone black woman like Frado, liberty was but a road to more suffering: hunger, loneliness, and abject penury.

It can also be argued that a lack of opportunity not only leads to more suffering, but is itself a form of suffering, especially for an intellectually curious girl like Frado.

Yet, just because an individual – a black woman, for example – did not receive the opportunities as her socioeconomic antipode – a white man – in no way implies that she cannot seek other, alternative methods by which to achieve bildung. For this reason,

Buckley’s list of bildungsroman-making attributes has proven itself exceedingly restrictive, superannuated, and in dire need of expansion and even revision. This is an opinion with which most modern literary scholars are in agreement; for, according to

Tobias Boes: “The rise of feminist, post-colonial and minority studies during the 1980s and 90s led to an expansion of [Dilthey’s] traditional Bildungsroman definition” (Boes

231).

But Buckley is not the only prominent literary scholar from the late twentieth century to neglect the dissimilarities between male and female bildung. Franco Moretti, in his book The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987), exposes his propensity to think patriarchally by not only using the gendered pronoun

“he,” but also by emphasizing the formative similarities between opposite sex characters as Jane Eyre and Wilhelm Meister. As Boes tells us, “Feminist scholars were quick to observe [that] Moretti pays scant attention to female development” (Boes 236).

Furthermore, Moretti adds that the core characteristic of the bildungsroman is found not in a character’s accretive development, but almost entirely in his or her youth: “Youth, or rather the European novel’s numerous versions of youth, becomes for our modern culture the age which holds the ‘meaning of life’: it is the first gift Mephisto offers Faust”

(Moretti 4). No doubt, a narrative parallel can be seen in such female bildungsromane as

Jane Eyre and their male equivalents in that they begin at childhood; be that as it may, to proclaim that a bildungsroman protagonist develops most dramatically during their early years is as erroneous as it is restrictive, as such a criterion excludes many important entries to the genre, such Alcott’s Moods (1868), Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

(1881), and Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), novels whose female protagonists do not experience bildung until well into their adulthood.

If Buckley and Moretti’s criticism of the bildungsroman genre has shown to be inordinately male-centric, it may be because the bildungsroman itself has its roots in white male privilege. Literary scholar Charlotte Goodman inquires, “The fact that

Buckley bases his generalizations about the Bildungsroman almost entirely on novels written by male novelists about male protagonists leads one to ask [if such] observations would apply equally as well to the Bildungsromane written by women” (Goodman

28). This privilege exhibits not only the imbalance of male over female narratives in the bildungsroman canon, but also the caricatural fashion in which women are portrayed in

17 male bildungsromane, which itself is demonstrative that most nineteenth-century male writers were less interested in depicting women realistically than they were through the eyes of their male protagonist – that is to say, through the male gaze, which Lois Tyson, author of Critical Theory Today, describes this way: “The man looks; the woman is looked at. And it is the one who looks who is in control, who holds the power to name things, the power to explain the world and so to rule the world” (Tyson 97). Take Charles

Dickens’s Great Expectations, one of the most popular and enduring bildungsromane ever composed. The protagonist, Pip, unexpectedly becomes the recipient of an immense fortune by an anonymous benefactor, without which he would have been fated to be a blacksmith’s apprentice. The tale begins, as bildungsromane typically do, during Pip’s childhood, and continues to chronicle major events that transpire during his formative years, with each event contributing to his overall development. While Dickens concentrates on the development of Pip, any form of advancement of his female characters appears to be of secondary concern. Estella, for example, is a young lady whose foremost purpose is to serve as an object to be pursued and procured by the smitten and tenacious Pip. Biddy, likewise, functions as an l’objet d’art once Estella proves to be beyond Pip’s reach. Finally, Miss Havisham is rendered as hysterical, if not totally insane, simply because she was abandoned by the man to whom she was to be married, as if to imply that conjugality is a choice by which her very sanity is dictated.

Dickens’s neglect of his female characters – that is, his comparatively one-dimensional representations of them – can be interpreted as a metaphor for Victorian-era patriarchy’s dichotomizing of women as a whole. Instead of beholding women as a multifaceted,

18 nuanced personalities, they were literarily and collectively pigeonholed into two drastically disparate binaries that were as extreme as they were simplistic, such as

Madonna/whore, or angel/monster. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar attest,

“Assertiveness, aggressiveness – all characteristics of a male life … are ‘monstrous’ in women precisely because ‘unfeminine’ and therefore unsuited to a gentle life of

‘contemplative purity.’ … Throughout most male literature, a sweet heroine inside the house is opposed to a vicious bitch outside” (Gilbert et al. 819). Clearly, like so many of his female character created by male writers, Estella, Biddy, and Miss Havisham are not realistic individuals so much as idealized caricatures filtered by a Dickensian male gaze.

Given that various scholars carry different interpretations of what constitutes a bildungsroman, and that certain demographics have enjoyed a distinct advantage from a socioeconomic standpoint, we are obliged to reconsider what, exactly, is meant by

“bildung.” For David Copperfield, a man who grows to become a novelist, learning to read and write was hardly a bildung (formative) moment; or, if it was, it was one that he took for granted. Contrast this to Frado, whose gratitude of a newly acquired literacy is expressed by the narrator: “Three months of schooling, summer and winter, she enjoyed for three years” (Wilson 23). In his primary essay on bildungsromane, Dilthey establishes the ideal conception of a literary character’s bildung (formation): “Development within the life of the individual is observed, each of its stages has its own intrinsic value and is at the same time the basis for a higher stage. The … conflicts of life appear as the necessary growth points through which the individual must pass on his way to maturity”

(Dilthey 30). Needless to say, no literary character’s trajectory of development takes such

19 an unobstructed course (for the plot of which that character is a part would not be very dramatic or exciting to read if it did). In short, a moment of bildung is relative. For the purposes of this thesis, however, a “bildung” will be marked as a solitary, epiphanic moment during which a character is spiritually empowered, or comes closer to reaching a sense of an individuated self. Such moments include Frado’s sudden understanding that she can defend herself against Mrs. Bellmont’s aggressions, or (as we will see in chapter four) Celie’s realization that “god” need not be found necessarily in Christianity. Even if such epiphanies are not by themselves spiritual in nature, they lead to a character’s overall spiritual transcendence.

Protagonists of bildungsromane, therefore, regardless of their class, race, or gender, must confront obstacles during their formative odysseys. But the ways in which such obstacles manifest themselves, as well as the number of obstacles which are manifested, can change depending on his or her gender and race. As a case in point, women, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were far more restricted, both professionally and intellectually, than their male complements, thereby making bildung of any kind much more challenging to achieve (and this, accordingly, explains why black female bildungsromane were so rare during this period). Victorian- era England and America is especially remembered for its stringent bifurcating of the sexes into a sharply drawn binary of which the two halves were viewed as mutually exclusive spheres and in which women were the weaker and more error-prone. A famous, or infamous, relic that espoused such heteronormative ideals was Coventry Patmore’s poem, “The Angel of the House,” in which Patmore recounts his courtship of Emily

Andrews, whom he believed to be the perfect woman: “Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf / Of his condoled necessities / She casts her best, she flings herself” (Patmore). Truly, Emily was all that which was expected of a woman of her era: pious, chaste, and perhaps most vitally, selfless. Thus, Emily became a shining exemplar to which all women were required to aspire, and the phrase “angel of the house” became an ubiquitous label to designate women’s prescribed gender role in the mid-nineteenth century.

Yet, while Emily was immortalized by her husband’s panegyric – namely, being congratulated for performing a role that was already prescribed for her – other women, such as Edna Pontellier or Jo March, were tempted by ideological unorthodoxy, desires and even goals that were apart from any domestic realm. For such women, joining the cult of domesticity was a secondary objective, if it was even an objective at all. These women favored an ideology in which their own bildung – spiritual or otherwise – could and would be supported. Sadly, such feminist ideologies were not the norm in nineteenth- century America. Women like Edna or Joe understood, instinctively if not consciously, that, in order for bildung to be achieved, they must, much to the chagrin of their husbands, make their own development a surreptitious priority, thereby stepping outside of acceptable gender norms. The editors of The Voyage In testify to the idea that

Victorian heteronormativity actively fought against women’s personal development, and a direct result of this gender oppression was, as one could predict, a comparative paucity in female bildungsromane: “While male protagonists struggle to find a hospitable context

21 in which to realize their aspirations, female protagonists must frequently struggle to voice any aspirations whatsoever” (Abel et al. 7).

But gender inequality reveals itself not only in the imbalance of male and female nineteenth century bildungsromane, but also in the time and manner in which the protagonists develop in respect to marriage. In such novels as Pride and Prejudice

(1813), Emma (1815), and Jane Eyre, marriage symbolized the pinnacle of a woman’s bildung experience. The woman was to live alongside a man who would provide for and protect her; she, meanwhile, was expected to conform, to some degree, to that role of

“angel of her house”; this was a woman’s raison d'être. Additional development was neither necessary nor possible; for, to be married to a generous and loving spouse was to reach the climax of that female protagonist’s intellectual development. Hence, in stories like Jane Austen’s Emma or Alcott’s Little Women, we see females striving to negotiate between social expectations and a furtive, yet innate appetite for personal development.

Because marriage was an inevitable event in the lives of most women such as Emma or

Jo, most manipulated appearances to seek a compromise between self and society, thus adhering to requisite gender norms whilst simultaneously discovering opportunities for bildung. Arguably the best example of such compromise can be found at the end of

Emma, when the eponymous heroine, after spending the extent of the novel persevering in her refusal to marry, matrimonially capitulates to the gallant Mr. Knightley. In Emma’s acquiescence, however, is a conspicuous stipulation; that is; that Mr. Knightley allow her valetudinarian father, Mr. Woodhouse, to live with them, and that Mr. Knightley himself never fail to treat her with the utmost esteem: “‘Oh! I always deserve the best treatment,

22 because I never put up with any other’” (Austen 428). Emma is willing to submit to patriarchal convention, but, pioneering feminist that she is, her assertiveness makes evident that any submission on her part will be on her terms.

For Emma and Jo, marriage should not – indeed, cannot – signify the conclusion of their formative journeys, but as discussed, their formative journeys were, on some level, compromised by their decision to marry. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, we see, in such classics as Alcott’s Moods, James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and

Chopin’s The Awakening, women who suffer the consequences of such compromise, or who persevere in their personal betterment despite being trapped in marriages which are, more frequently than not, loveless and even disastrous, and yet from which, in most cases, escape is all but an utter impossibility, lest they should be relegated a “fallen woman.” These texts serve as documented evidence of the evolution of the female bildungsroman, as they depict women as beings who retain a semblance of their former autonomy; that is, women who have not been inculcated successfully by patriarchal values, who believe themselves to be more than mere addendums to their husbands, and thus whose sovereignty over self has not been fully usurped by marriage. The editors of

The Voyage In note that: “[Late nineteenth century] fiction shows women developing later in life after conventional expectations of marriage and motherhood have been fulfilled and found insufficient” (Abel et al. 7). Such women themselves fall into two categories. There is the woman who attempts to circumvent patriarchy so that her lifelong dreams may be realized or her innermost passions may be satiated. Consider Edna from

The Awakening, who is suffering in an unhappy marriage, living what Sandra Gilbert and

Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic call a “death in life”: “To be selfless is not only to be noble, it is to be dead. A life that has no story … is really a life of death, a death-in-life” (Gilbert et al. 817). Edna tries to sidestep gender norms by engaging in an affair; alas, Edna knows, deep down, that this secret and illicit behavior cannot last forever, and to liberate herself from her normal life, which has for so long kept her a prisoner, she must end life itself, and, in so doing, discover a “life in death.”

Then there is Isabel Archer, a woman who once craved to live her life to its fullest, and yet who, halfway through The Portrait of a Lady, surrenders herself to what she sees as an inexorable fate, to be forevermore condemned to a lifeless marriage, letting herself be dispositionally devoured by an implacable patriarchy. The Portrait of Lady is the narrative of a woman who, in spite of an extant desire for autonomy, has, so as to conform to the prevailing standards of patriarchy, allowed her fire for life to be controlled

– but not extinguished – from a raging blaze of passion to a smoldering ember of ennui; upon concluding The Portrait of a Lady, we intuit that this ember will one day cease to even smolder, and Isabel will assimilate to the mandates of patriarchy internally as much as she does externally. In Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, Annis Pratt calls this trajectory, which was prevalent in nineteenth-century female bildungsromane, “growing down”: The [bildungsroman] portrays a world in which the [heroine] is destined for disappointment. … Every element of her desired world—freedom to come and go … meaningful work, exercise of the intellect, and use of her own erotic capabilities— inevitably clashes with patriarchal norms” (Pratt 29). Thus, whereas Edna endeavours to protest patriarchy in her own way, a novel such as The Portrait of a Lady, by blatantly

24 showing its readers how an independently inclined woman is ideologically constrained by marriage, and is therefore led to suffer, itself becomes the protestor. Regardless of a literary protagonist’s category – that is, the woman who circumvents patriarchy or the woman who begrudgingly yields to it – all women in bildungsromane are forced to live double lives. Herein is the principal difference between male bildungsromane and female bildungsromane: not only were men encouraged to develop intellectually, but it is because they were encouraged to develop that they were free to be themselves; to wit, to articulate sentiments and opinions openly and without reserve. Women, conversely, were prohibited in, or at least frowned upon for, involving themselves in discourse on a vast array of subjects, from politics to literary studies; of course, this made bildung an enormous challenge for women who felt driven toward spiritual or intellectual self- improvement, impelling such women to assume an assortment of personæ. (This “double life,” it should be said, is represented almost literally by the pseudonyms that were used by numerous nineteenth-century female authors, a topic on which I will elaborate in chapter two.)

Each of the protagonists on which this paper focuses – that is, Frado, Celie, and

Janie – are infected by this internalization of inferiority. Christianity, while empowering for many Americans, has also been interpreted by countless racists and misogynists to accommodate their own racial and gender-oppressive ideologies, giving such sins as slavery a shameless veneer of piety. One such victim of this ideological contorting is

Frado, whose bildung is thwarted because she meets the malevolent Mrs. Bellmont alongside the benevolent Aunt Abby, two women whose temperaments are diametrically

25 opposed, and yet, both of whom identify as “Christian.” The contradicting behaviors of

Mrs. Bellmont and Aunt Abby cause a great deal of spiritual confusion in Frado, who does not, by her narrative’s conclusion, decipher Christianity’s ultimate meaning. Even more tragically, Frado fails to recognize Christianity as an interpretively malleable construct, one that can be “customized” – just as Mrs. Bellmont “customizes” her

Christianity to validate her racist proclivities. In her failure, Frado is unable to design a personalized form of spirituality – that is, a religion that is unique to her – from which racial prejudice and patriarchy are excluded. That being said, let us move on to discuss the historically fascinating and thematically complicated bildungsroman that is Our Nig; or, Sketches of the Life of a Free Black.

Chapter 2: Frado’s Inability to Decipher Christianity’s Meaning in Our Nig

“I held my Sabbath school at the house of a free colored man … The work of instructing my dear fellow-slaves was the sweetest engagement with which I was ever blessed. We loved each other, and to leave them at the close of the Sabbath was a severe cross indeed. When I think that these precious souls are to-day shut up in the prison-house of slavery, my feelings overcome me, and I am almost ready to ask, ‘Does a righteous God govern the universe? and for what does he hold the thunders in his right hand, if not to smite the oppressor, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the spoiler?’”

Frederick Douglass – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Toward the end of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, Frado overhears her mistress, the sadistic Mrs. Bellmont, express disapproval of Frado’s church attendance. In response to his wife’s discontent, Mr. Bellmont remarks sarcastically, “‘I thought you Christians held to going to church,’” to which wife retorts, “‘Yes, but who ever thought of having a nigger go, except to drive others there?’” (Wilson 49). During this exchange, Frado utters a prayer to herself: “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Wilson 50). This line indicates the degree to which Frado has internalized the abuse that she has received since being abandoned by Mag Smith, her mother, as a small girl. While nineteenth-century

Protestantism dictated that all humans were sinners – or perhaps it is more apt to say that human nature is intrinsically sinful – Frado’s circumstance is different in that she has been ideologically programmed to believe that her black skin is a feature from which sin originates. So far as Frado is concerned, black skin is sin made manifest, or a corporeal display of moral inferiority, a conclusion that can be substantiated by several of literary scholars, including Elizabeth West, who writes, “Frado has internalized prevailing signifiers of whiteness–she associates whiteness with the moral equivalent of goodness”

(West 5). This is an example of a colonized consciousness, a concept that is explained by

Lois Tyson as a way “To convince [subordinate peoples] to see their situation the way the imperialist nation wants them to see it, to convince them, for example, that they are mentally, spiritually, and culturally inferior to their conquerors” (Tyson 61). Thus, as a black woman, any “sin” of which Frado may be guilty derives not from any inherent propensity to do wrong, but purely from the pigmentation of her skin.

It is difficult to ascertain with absolute certainty just how many nineteenth- century African Americans had, like, Frado, suffered from an internalized sense of inferiority, or a colonized consciousness. What can be determined, however, is that the number of African Americans who converted to a sect of Christianity in the early to mid- nineteenth century (the period during which Our Nig takes place) rose exponentially.

Much of this mass proselytism was due to the willingness of the Baptist and Methodist churches to bring African Americans into membership. This led to numerous African

Americans becoming preachers and establishing churches of their own, such as John

Gloucester, who founded the first African Presbyterian Church in 1807, or Absalom

Jones, who was ordained a priest in 1804 (Raboteau 24-25). More fundamentally,

Christianity permitted African Americans to interpret Christianity – that interpretively malleable ideological construct – in a markedly disparate manner than their slave-owning compatriots. In Canaan Land, Raboteau tells us that, “The mission of black Christians was to convert the consciences of Americans to adopt the true Christian attitude of repentance for the sin of slavery” (Raboteau 34, emphasis my own). On an ontological level, Christianity provided African Americans with an ideological medium through which to interpret the prejudicial acts. For slaves in particular, Christianity had a

28 humanizing quality. In Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South

(written before Canaan Land), Raboteau corroborates that, “Worship helped Christian slaves to fight off slavery’s terrible power to depersonalize its victims” (Raboteau 63).

As we would expect, Frado, too, is depersonalized, to a point where she asks herself, “Is there a heaven for the black? She knew there was one for James, and Aunt

Abby, and all good white people; but was there any for blacks?” (Wilson 47). As Our Nig progresses, and as Frado continues to endure Mrs. Bellmont’s maltreatment, she develops a skepticism of not only heaven as a place into which her black skin precludes the possibility of admission, but also, ultimately, of a paradisiac endpoint to which she has any desire to travel. Be that as it may, Frado is not always consistent in this skepticism, for her opinions about Christianity and its promises vacillate; for every solemn pronouncement that Frado “did not love God; she did not serve him or know how to”

(Wilson 55) is an equally earnest lapse into piety. By the novel’s closing paragraph, it is clear that Frado is still confused as to what Christianity means to her; that is, how – or even if – she can modify various tenets of Christianity to suit her needs socially and emotionally as a black woman. Raboteau states that many Christian slaves in antebellum

America did just this, and did so in a myriad ways, such as when they stole from their overseers simply because they knew themselves to be stolen property: “The slaves condemned the religion of the masters as hypocritical and refused to obey moral rules held up to them by whites, especially commands against stealing” (Raboteau 56). Unlike her literary successors Janie and Celie, Frado fails to come across, or even strive to seek, alternative forms of spiritual enlightenment (although Wilson does, a topic into which I

29 will also delve). Moreover, Frado’s failure to become an ontologically transcendent entity is also made evident structurally, that is to say, by Wilson’s prose, which is heterodiegetic (that is, Wilson’s narrator does not take part in the plot), and yet in which strong traces of autodiegesis (meaning that the plot’s narrator is also its protagonist) can be found, reminding us that Our Nig is, at the very least, a semi-autobiographical novel. I contest that Wilson’s decision to create a narrative persona separate from herself is to not only repress the effectiveness and potentiality of her own narrative voice, but also to prove that Wilson herself, even while Our Nig was being written, continued to internalize her former mistress’s conviction that African Americans are undeserving of a voice;

Wilson’s choice to use heterodiegesis to tell her life’s story is structural proof of this internalization – she has been programmed to “silence” her own voice (just as Joe Starks attempts to silence Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, as we will come to discover in chapter IV). As it is, Our Nig is a document in which Wilson’s voice wants to be more open than it is, but cannot, because she has been ideologically programmed for so long to be silent. Should Wilson have employed, like Frederick Douglass before her, autodiegesis as a technique by which to convey her narrative – that is, should she have made Our Nig a straight autobiography as opposed to creating Frado, a persona behind which she conceals her real self – she would have shown that she has risen above and beyond racist propaganda, making Our Nig, in turn, more complete as a bildungsroman.

Since its initial 1859 publication, Our Nig (the complete title of which is, Our

Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story House, North. Showing

That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There) has been a text that has been categorized under

30 a wide variety of genres, from a slave narrative, a fallen woman narrative, a novel of sensibility, a conversion narrative, a novel of domestic fiction, and, of course, a bildungsroman. It is on these latter two genres that the preponderance of this chapter will focus. Not only does Wilson’s novel qualify as a bildungsroman, but it also receives a special distinction for being “the first African-American [bildungsroman] published in the United States” (Lanser 194). This claim is highly debatable, as Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which could easily be labeled as a bildungsroman, was published fourteen years earlier. This point is moot, however; for, even if Wilson does not receive credit for composing the original African American bildungsroman, she is, unequivocally, acknowledged for writing the first female African

American bildungsroman. As we have noted, the female bildungsroman can be considered a drastically disparate genre from its male counterpart, particularly in

Wilson’s lifetime, when the sexes were heavily demarcated, viewed as two mutually exclusive halves. According to Mavis Reimer, the female bildungsroman is formed by “A synthesis of the [male] Bildungsroman … and domestic fiction” (Reimer 139). Novels of domesticity were popular in the nineteenth century, as it gave women, who made up the majority of the reading public (Reimer 139), characters to which they could relate and patterns of behavior with which they could readily identify. Consider Louisa May

Alcott’s Little Women (1868), one of the most beloved female bildungsromane ever written, whose protagonist, Jo, dreams romantically of “A stable full of Arabian steeds, rooms piled with books … [doing] something heroic or wonderful … [writing] books, and [getting] rich and famous” (Alcott 190). While Joe never becomes a “great” writer,

31 she does discover happiness by inheriting her aunt’s mansion as well as by meeting Mr.

Bhaer, to whom she becomes engaged, and with whom she opens a business: a boarding school for boys. Jo’s childhood dreams are never fully realized; instead, they are replaced by her choice to marry, thereby making her an adherent to the cult of domesticity, and making Little Women as much of a novel of domesticity as it is a bildungsroman. Of Jo’s bildung, Pratt states, “Jo clearly perceives the irony that growing up, according to

[Victorian] gender norms, means growing down—an atrophy of the personality, a premature senility” (Pratt 30).

Alas, Frado has neither any mansion to inherit nor any man on whom she can depend for love (the husband she does acquire dies during a trip abroad). Herein lies the difference between the white female bildungsroman and the African American female bildungsroman: the former is subjected to only one layer of oppression – patriarchy – whilst the latter is subjected to dual layers of oppression: patriarchy and racism (when contemplating Our Nig, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple as a collective whole, this detail becomes drastically apparent). Consequently, heroines of

African American female bildungsromane must encounter twice as many developmental hindrances – individual hindrances, such as Mrs. Bellmont, or societal hindrances, such a lack of opportunity in most workplaces – before their personal efforts to improve themselves intellectually, professionally, and – in Frado’s case – spiritually, can be actualized.

Let us broach initially the first of these two layers of oppression: racism. Whereas

Celie and Janie are subjugated almost exclusively because of their gender, Frado is

32 mistreated because of the color of her skin. It is for this reason that Frado embraces – or, at least, wants to embrace – Christianity, an ideology that has a promise of succor.

Naturally, the ways in which one can interpret “succor” – like the ideology from which it stems – are manifold. For some slaves, the promise of a paradisiacal setting to which one’s soul, subsequent to a life spent in abject penury and misery, was “succor” on its own. For Frado, however – about whose own eligibility for heaven she remains dubious –

– “succor” is reconceptualized as an assurance of divine justice – that is, that Mrs.

Bellmont will inevitably be punished someday by God as a consequence of her spurious piety. The image of Mrs. Bellmont being penalized by God is, for Frado, heaven enough.

This mere possibility of this assurance not only resuscitates Frado’s faith during moments when it starts to wane, but also imparts her with behavioral spirit: “Frado … [sparkled] with an exuberance of spirit almost beyond restraint” (Wilson 11). The idea that God is capable of imposing vengeance upon, of even evincing anger toward, a sinner is one that has its roots in Puritanism, and especially John Winthrop, who, while aboard the Arbella

– a ship en route to the Massachusetts Bay Colony – delivered a sermon, which became known as, “A Model of Christian Charity.” In it, Winthrop alleges that, if any individual puts his or her own needs before those of a neighbor, then, “The Lord will surely break out in wrath against [them], and be revenged of such a people” (Winthrop 176). Indeed,

Mrs. Bellmont is culpable for far more than merely putting her own welfare before

Frado’s, as she not only chooses to ignore Frado’s welfare entirely, but also endeavors to damage it. This treatment engenders a hope in Frado, who is optimistic that the severity of God’s retribution will be in perfect proportion to Mrs. Bellmont’s sins.

Frado’s exposure to racist ideology commences on the day in which Mag forsakes her. Jack, Mrs. Bellmont's son, informs his sister, Mary: “It wouldn’t be two days before you would be telling the girls about our nig, our nig” (Wilson 16). Wilson italicizes “our” to call attention to the fact that the preposition that precedes the epithet is of higher importance than the epithet itself; for, not only is Frado losing her name in favor of a degrading appellative – the first step required to deprive someone of that which makes them unique – but it is also implied that the person to which that degrading appellative is attached is to be reduced to a commodity, or an object to be possessed solely, so far as

Mrs. Bellmont and Mary are concerned, for utilitarian use. Hence, to refer to her as “our nig” strips Frado of her identity as well as her humanity, dwindling her to a nameless and genderless item to be exploited. Mrs. Bellmont confesses freely of her desire to commodify Frado for her own material gain: “‘I don’t mind the nigger in the child. … If I could make her do my work in a few years, I would keep her. I have so much trouble with girls I hire, I am almost persuaded if I have one to train up in my way from a child, I shall be able to keep them awhile’” (Wilson 16). This quote, which invokes a verse from

Proverbs about rearing one’s child so as to ensure that he or she shall grow to be a good adult, was chosen consciously by Wilson in order to expose the ideological hypocrisy of

Mrs. Bellmont, a woman who purports to be a “professor of religion”; or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that Mrs. Bellmont’s prejudiced mentality is so potent that it supersedes her ostensive religiosity. Thus, Mrs. Bellmont is an exemplum of the power and implacability of racial ideology; that she, a professedly pious woman, could besmirch the sagacity of Proverbs, shows that malice and hostility are characteristics that know no

34 absolutes. To be under the guardianship of such a woman – a woman who actively works at preventing Frado from experiencing any coming-of-age – proves to be as spiritually perplexing for Frado as it is psychologically and physically exhausting.

This is far from the occasion in which Mrs. Bellmont twists the meaning of

Scripture to accommodate her own racially charged mindset. While reading Our Nig, it becomes easy to forget that Frado is not a slave, but an indentured servant, a title that, from a modern standpoint, may be deemed a close cousin to, if not a blatant euphemism of, slavery. Just like countless of her kin who were enslaved in the soon-to-be

Confederate States of America, Frado is whipped and beaten for the most trivial of transgressions, and, sometimes, for no reason at all. What’s more, in a move that is arguably even more insidious and damaging to Frado’s psyche, Mrs. Bellmont avers that

Christianity is a privilege reserved for white people, effectively whitewashing the very ideological construct on which Frado relies for survival and even a hint of inner peace:

“[It would] do no good for [Frado] to attempt prayer; prayer was for whites, not for blacks. If she minded her mistress, and did what she commanded, it was all that was required of her” (Wilson 52). Here Mrs. Bellmont refers to Colossians 3:22, which was a popular verse amongst slavery’s advocates, and which reads: “Servants, obey in all things your masters.” The fact that Mrs. Bellmont interprets biblical verse to justify her cruel behavior is reminiscent of Thomas Auld from Douglass’s narrative; Auld was a man who, as he would proceed to whip Douglass, would cite a passage from Luke: “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes” (Luke

12:47). Of being Auld’s slave, Douglass writes: “I should regard being the slave of a

35 religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst” (Douglass 1217). Of the parallels between Our Nig and Douglass’s Narrative, Christopher Mulvey says,

“Wilson’s novel presents another evolution of the slave narrative by universalizing the virtual slavery of so many caught in segregation’s trap and from which escape was less easy than from a plantation” (Mulvey 19). Though this claim by Douglass may not surprise most twenty-first century readers, it is nonetheless a paradox that innumerable slave owners would utilize the Bible as an authoritative tool with which to validate their practice, since the Bible’s stance on slavery is, at best, ambiguous.

Many readers of Our Nig may underestimate the extent of the effects of Mrs.

Bellmont’s pernicious whitewashing of Christianity on Frado’s psychology. We must not forget that when Mrs. Bellmont begins to vocalize her displeasure at Frado’s church attendance, Frado herself is still a prepubescent, and, therefore, quite impressionable. As a result, it does not take long before Frado begins to internalize Mrs. Bellmont’s deceptions, initiating within her a series of existential and ontological crises, which are articulated initially when Frado asks James, Mrs. Bellmont’s (comparatively benevolent) son: “‘Who made me so?’ ‘God;’ answered James. ‘Did God make you?’ ‘Yes.’ … ‘Who made your mother?’ ‘God.’ ‘Did the same God that made her make me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, then, I don’t like him.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because he made her white, and me black. Why didn’t he make us both white?’” (Wilson 29). In this quote, we become witness to the colonization of Frado’s consciousness; that Mrs. Bellmont has, to some level, succeeded in convincing Frado that Caucasians are the hegemonic race, and Mrs. Bellmont, as a

Caucasian woman, possesses all attributes of which Frado is, or at least should be, desirous, despite her knowledge that to possess such attributes is an utter impossibility.

Wilson’s colonized consciousness – her internalized belief in the superiority of whiteness – also shows in less overt ways. For example, Jim, a black man who yearns to marry Mag, says, “I’s black outside, I know, but I’s got a white heart inside. Which you rather have, a black heart in a white skin, or a white heart in a black one?” (Wilson 9).

Jim is doing more here than simply contrasting black and white, as he is also reminding

Wilson’s reader of the dispositions with which such colors are, in Western culture, most generally associated. For most, white is synonymous with sexual chastity, cleanliness, and wholesomeness; black, on the other hand, connotes evilness, death, and the unknown.

Thus, by insisting that his “white heart” will compensate for the “sin” that is his blackness, we see that Jim is debasing himself unapologetically. We could conclude a priori that Jim’s consciousness, like Frado’s, is colonized.

Thus, we are provoked to inquire: how can a narrative qualify as a bildungsroman if its protagonist has a colonized consciousness? As a concept, is a “colonized consciousness” not a malevolent stratagem designed to inhibit the development of those who are members of a race that is lower on society’s socioeconomic hierarchy? The answer to these inquiries is what makes African American female bildungsromane unique, especially in comparison to their Caucasian complements. If we recall Little

Women, Jo chooses to marry Mr. Bhaer and to live a life of simple domesticity, just as

Jane Eyre makes the choice to return to Mr. Rochester, even after receiving a vast and unexpected fortune, thereby forfeiting the possibility of an economically and

37 intellectually independent life. In short, the heroines of these stories willingly capitulate to patriarchal norms, and, as has been said in chapter one, Pratt calls this phenomenon

“growing down.” Unlike Jo or Jane Eyre, however, it was never Frado’s choice to engage in domestic labor (it is also safe to say that Mr. Bhaer will never use a piece of rawhide to whip Jo if she does not complete a task in a timely fashion). Thus, Frado not only “grows down” throughout the majority of Our Nig, but also her downward trajectory is far more precipitous than that of either Jo or Jane Eyre, who must contend with only one layer of oppression – patriarchy. The odds are overwhelmingly against Frado; that she overcomes such seemingly insuperable odds is nothing short of miraculous, and demonstrates that bildung is possible even when one is trapped in the most adverse and violent of circumstances.

The progression of Wilson’s narrative reveals more abusiveness by Mrs.

Bellmont; beatings and excessive toiling continue to be a part of Frado’s daily life.

Regardless of this grueling reality, Frado is able to achieve bildung in subtle, but certainly not inconsequential, ways. For example, Mr. Bellmont decides that Frado should attend school (a decision that, needless to say, goes against the wishes of his wife), which allows Frado to “Read and spell, and [know] the elementary steps in grammar, arithmetic, and writing” (Wilson 23). Though she may be developing intellectually, Frado remains spiritually stagnant. For instance, in spite of her sedulous reading of the Bible, Frado is unable to “penetrate the veil of doubt and sin which clouded her soul” (Wilson 48). Frado yearns to become a believer, but the abuse to which she is subjected prevents her from fully subscribing to this ideology. This “doubt” stunts

38 ant progress of Frado’s spiritual bildung, which is, arguably, more crucial for a woman in her situation; for, if properly cultivated, spirituality has the ability to lend credence to the impression that a person is innately valid or has a some purpose, sentiments which can contribute to one’s overall sense of self-acceptance and tranquility. The problem with

Frado is that she is being spiritually misguided by Mrs. Bellmont, who ideologically programs her to believe just the opposite; namely, that because Frado is black, heaven is a place that is forever beyond her reach; or, if she does, she will “never be as high up as

[a white person]” (Wilson 55). This continuous whitewashing of Christianity by Mrs.

Bellmont generates in Frado a source of inalienable bewilderment, leaving her in a state of spiritual limbo. Why would the same God who created Aunt Abby and James – kind, compassionate souls who assure Frado that “[Mrs. Bellmont’s] views were by no means general” (Wilson 42) – also create a woman as evil as Mrs. Bellmont? If Mrs. Bellmont is correct in saying that she will ascend to a higher place in heaven, is such a privilege due to her status as white woman, or is it because she is a “professor of religion?” Such existential questions were no doubt asked by Frado in her struggle to come of age; and, more important than the answers to such questions is the fact that, for Frado, race and religion are linked inextricably.

Frado is encouraged to set aside her connections between race and religion when, one evening, she hears a minister’s plea to “[Accept] offers of mercy, to receive a compassionate Jesus as their Saviour. ‘Come to Christ, [the minister] urged, ‘all, young or old, white or black, bond or free, come all to Christ for pardon; repent, believe’”

(Wilson 47). The explicit acknowledgement of her race by a Christian authority renews

Frado’s longing to dedicate herself to spiritual enlightenment by way of Christianity; this is a moment in which Frado discovers some respite, ephemeral as it is, from her normal burden of being spiritually adrift. If a representative of God has proclaimed that she has as much of a chance of being admitted into paradise as any of her white counterparts, then she will endeavor to be as devout as one can possibly be: “Aunt Abby noticed that

[Frado] was particularly engaged in reading the Bible; and this strengthened her conviction that a heavenly Messenger was striving with her” (Wilson 48). Thus, for a brief instant, it appears as if Frado’s spirituality will be found in Christianity, and Frado’s bildung will ostensibly cease to be in limbo.

The word “ostensibly” was as necessary as it was deliberate; for, in Frado’s newfound vigor to become a disciple of Christ, a bizarre sort of cognitive dissonance can be perceived in her logic. Even if Frado did wholeheartedly accept Christianity, her colonized consciousness would not be ameliorated. This is proven when Frado, immediately upon hearing her minister’s plea, thinks: “She knew she was unfit for any heaven, made for whites or blacks” (Wilson 47). Thus, although the minister declares that

God will open His arms to her, she views herself as ineligible, so deep are the repercussions of Mrs. Bellmont’s incessant abuse. Frado has been programmed to regard her skin as materialized sin, a bodily fault from which she will never be able to dissociate, and which, she has been taught, is more egregious than Mrs. Bellmont’s most egregious behavior. West attests to the idea that Frado’s skin color is a component by which her world of suffering is dictated: “In the construction of her own self-image,

Frado does not escape the influences of racial signifier—in her mind the primary source

40 of troubles is her non-whiteness” (West 5). Thus, what would appear to be the commencement of an upward developmental trajectory – a bildung – is actually a self- imposed delusion; Frado’s narrative cannot be a bildungsroman until she can learn to unlearn the ideas by which she has been indoctrinated.

But while Frado’s consciousness may be colonized, her subconscious – or her innermost, primordial self – continues to revolt against such psychological invasions.

Frado’s subconscious rebellion to free her captive mind makes itself known when she announces that any heaven in which Mrs. Bellmont resided would be, for her, no heaven at all: “Frado pondered; her mistress was a professor of religion; was she going to heaven? Then she did not wish to go. If she should be near James, even, she could not be happy with those fiery eyes watching her ascending path” (Wilson 58). Though this is not the first moment in which Frado expresses her disapproval of the Judeo-Christian

God, it is possible to discern that she, by this point, is in the nascent stages of comprehending Christianity as an interpretively malleable construct, for her “pondering” has evolved from mere disapproval to a transparent and deliberate refusal to perform an action: “she did not wish to go.” This upward developmental trajectory is augmented when, in what must be the largest formative moment, or bildung, in Our Nig, Frado confronts Mrs. Bellmont, which causes Mrs. Bellmont to reduce the frequency of her whippings, and which, consequently, bestows upon Frado a newfangled puissance: “She did not know, before, that she had a power to ward off assaults” (Wilson 58). This epiphanic moment of agency, the gravity of which cannot be overstated, is sine qua non to Frado’s development, as it grants her a new sense of an individuated self. Frado

41 rapidly grows intoxicated with this sensation, going as far as to contemplate poisoning

Mrs. Bellmont; however, she never acts upon her this scheme, as Christianity, that vehicle by which Mrs. Bellmont has managed to colonize Frado’s consciousness, subdues her newly emboldened agency (and revenge): “But she was restrained by an overruling

Providence” (Wilson 60).

We shall now take a step back to analyze Our Nig from a structural perspective; to wit, Wilson’s prose itself will serve as a basis for scrutiny. The prose of Our Nig provides much interest, for Wilson opts to tell her tale using, paradoxically, heterodiegesis (as opposed to autodiegesis, which is more perhaps more common in autobiographies, and which is used in Douglass’s Narrative). The next aspect of my argument is provocative: I suggest the reason for Wilson’s creative decision to employ heterodiegesis was perchance an unconscious one, and that such a choice may signify that her voice continued, at the time during which Our Nig was composed, to be repressed on a deeply-embedded level, thereby showing the profound repercussions of Mrs. Wilson’s prolonged abuse on Wilson’s psyche. In addition, this continued repression is itself indicative of Wilson’s inability to decipher the precise meaning Christianity, an ideological construct to which her tormentor was forevermore connected, and about which, as a result, she remained so ambivalent.

Not only does Wilson utilize heterodiegesis, but she also changes her name to

Frado, giving herself a sort of alter ego. However, it may be less obvious that Wilson changed the name of almost everyone else in her novel, including the Bellmont family, whose real name was “Hayward” (the woman upon whom Mrs. Bellmont was based was

42 named Mary Hayward) (Foreman 92). Ever since the rediscovery of Our Nig by Henry

Louis Gates, Jr., in 1981 (one year before The Color Purple), literary critics have speculated upon Wilson’s decision to write her own life’s story in the form of a novel, the most persuasive of which is by Susan Lanser, who, in her book Fictions of Authority, claims: “The profitability of the novel for a destitute mother whom poverty had ‘forced to some experiment’” (Lanser 195). Lanser also agrees that numerous supplementary incentives may have been the cause for Wilson’s novelization of her own life, albeit none of them, interestingly, include the possibility that Wilson was psychosomatically compelled to conceptualize Frado as a persona outside herself in order to distance her present self from her past self, thereby reliving memories which may have been, in all probability, too traumatic to process fully. Evidence for this hypothesis exists not in any secondary source, but in Our Nig itself. Consider that the first three chapters incorporate possessive pronouns in their chapter titles: “my” for chapters ones and two, and “me” for chapter three. These pronouns signify a semblance of personal identity, a severely beleaguered and barely surviving indicator of self-hood. Yet, as Mrs. Bellmont’s verbal and physical abuse persists, such vestiges of subjectivity dissipate completely, only to be supplanted by a dehumanized and defragmented self, or a sense of self as a voiceless commodity. To be sure, Frado, like so many victims of abuse, eventually internalizes that which her abuser is communicating to her: namely, that Frado is property and, as such, shall not have a voice. Of course, Mrs. Bellmont does not actually tell Frado this so much as she insinuates it by torturing Frado in a symbolic fashion: “[Mrs. Bellmont propped]

Frado’s mouth open with a piece of wood [and] shut her up in a dark room” (Wilson 20).

Like her slave-owning compatriots, Mrs. Bellmont forces Frado’s jaw open with a piece of wood so she can keep her abuse a secret, literally prohibiting Frado’s capacity for speech. Foreman tells us that: “Many critics have noted the irony of Frado’s mouth being propped open so she won’t open her mouth, as it were, concerning Mrs. B.’s behavior”

(Foreman 95). In another instance, Mrs. Bellmont warns Frado that, should she disclose to James the treatment of which she has been a recipient, she would “cut her tongue out”

(Wilson 40). Mrs. Bellmont’s proactive forbidding of voice is what initiates the dissolution of Frado’s identity. This collapse, or dispossession, of Frado’s identity is mirrored structurally in chapter four, the title of which has a heterodiegetic “nig” in lieu of a possessive pronoun, or autodiegesis. That being said, when we remember that the primary goal of Mrs. Bellmont’s (Hayward’s) abuse is to make Frado (Wilson) afraid, or even unable, to speak, we recognize that she was largely successful in her attempts; for, in her reversion from autodiegetic to progressively heterodiegetic chapter titles, it is as if

Wilson exhibits subliminally a surviving fear of “speaking” when describing various harmful events in her novel, events which actually transpired during her involuntary servitude (and even “nig” disappears in lieu of vague chapter descriptors, as if Frado is diminishes wholly into a vacuum of nothingness, from inferior entity to nonentity). Even by the time she began to compose Our Nig – thirty-six years subsequent to the demise of

Mrs. Hayward – expression of any kind for Wilson remained a punishable transgression, so indelibly did Mrs. Hayward inculcate her and perpetually upset the balance of her resilient psyche.

But it is not only in her chapter titles that Wilson uses autodiegesis; for, in the

44 opening sentence of the last chapter, she writes, “A few years ago, within the compass of my narrative, there appeared often in some of our New England villages, professed fugitives from slavery” (Wilson 70). This line is significant, as it is the only moment of

Our Nig in which Wilson inserts a possessive pronoun into the body of the narrative, referring to herself as opposed to Frado. Scholars seem to be at a loss as to Wilson’s rationale for this sole application of autodiegesis. Thus, one is driven to surmise that, the worst of her suffering behind her, Wilson no longer has a subconscious need to separate her present self from her painful past because the past about which she now writes is far less distressing to recollect. Whatever Wilson’s motive may have been, her narrative incongruity is made all the more perceptible by her immediate reversion to heterodiegesis in the following sentence: “Such a [slave] appeared in the new home of Frado” (Wilson

70).

If I am correct in asserting that Wilson uses heterodiegesis to psychosomatically circumvent latent and unresolved traumas, she cannot be faulted for such a decision (if it was, indeed, a conscious decision), as we must recall that, as a black woman, Wilson endured – and especially in antebellum America – dual layers of oppression, and Mrs.

Hayward embodied but one of these layers – racism. The second – and, in Wilson’s era, comparatively overlooked – layer, patriarchy, was undoubtedly experienced by Wilson upon leaving the Hayward residence. Evidence for this can be seen in Wilson’s pseudonym, which happens to be, not coincidentally, the same as the title of her novella:

Our Nig. Like many of her female contemporaries, such as George Sand, George Eliot,

Acton Bell, Currer Bell, and Ellis Bell, Wilson assumed an alias so as to conceal her

45 gender (even Alcott took a penname – A.M. Barnard – under which she achieved quite a bit of notoriety prior to inditing Little Women). In Fictions of Authority, Lanser notes that, for Wilson, a pseudonym was particularly necessary because “The great proportion of slave narratives were written by men [since] the histories of female slaves so frequently involved rape by white masters and therefore ‘compromised’ the teller’s virtue according to white patriarchy’s double standards” (Lanser 196). Thus, Lanser intimates that Wilson, like her fellow female scribes, assumed an alias as a way to subvert patriarchy, a construct which, for the most part, frowned upon women writing novels

(thereby hindering sales); unlike her fellow scribes, however, the exact reasons for subversion were not only to elude patriarchy’s ubiquitous grasp, but also to satirize her status as an second-class citizen, even lower than her white female complements, and perhaps the lowest in society’s echelon. The concept of a female novelist was, for

Victorians, risqué in and of itself; the concept of a black female novelist would have been nothing less than outré.

Howbeit, as we have learned, Wilson’s primarily heterodiegetic prose hints at a overpowering and lingering hesitancy to “speak” about the brutality to which she was mercilessly subjected; hence, as modern readers, we become curious as to how much of her self-deprecating pseudonym is genuine satire versus how much is merely genuine.

Patriarchy manifests itself not only in Wilson’s unwillingness to divulge her gender – lest she should face consequences – but also in how other female characters in Our Nig are subjugated. Consider Jane, who, in spite of being handicapped, is pursued by “Two young men [who] seemed desirous of possessing her” (Wilson 32). If we analyze the

46 word “possessing” – not etymologically, but contextually – we come upon a linguistic remnant of a frame of mind that has been exercised by men since antiquity: that women were but objects to be “possessed,” and that marriage was but a customary transaction by which such possession was legitimized. In The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner expounds upon the evolution of sexual inequity; she writes that, in primitive communities, it was common for women to be abducted by members of a rival tribe, and that an inevitable outcome of this regular kidnapping was that “Conquered women were protected by the men who had conquered them … in the process, women [became] thought of as possessions, as things—they became reified—while men became the reifiers because they conquered and protected” (Lerner 49). Through the passage of epochs, women were collectively relegated to a communally subordinate rank; to wit, commodities – sexual receptacles or vessels from which new life spawns – to be to be used or impassively transacted. This transacting of commodities, of which the marriage ceremony is a legitimizer, marks, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the beginning of women’s subordination; Gayle Rubin, in paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, states, “Lévi-Strauss adds to the theory of primitive reciprocity the idea that marriages are a most basic form of gift exchange, in which it is women who are the most precious of gifts” (Rubin 778).

Thus, in Our Nig, when the narrator says that George has “his desire to love and possess

[Jane] as his own” (Wilson 33), we can interpret the verb “possess” as a lexical vestige of a distilled patriarchy, an ideology to which George, through generations of cultural conditioning, blindly adheres and which was, thanks to the efforts of such feminist pioneers as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, gradually being exposed for what it was: a construct

47 of superannuated origin. Despite this burgeoning sexual equity, George is a man who envisions himself as Jane’s “possessor.” He is, therefore, like so many men of his era, a subscriber of patriarchy; for George, “possess” is but a euphemism for “conquer,” and

“Jane” is but a euphemism for “gift.”

Wilson also demonstrates that African American men are not exempt from commodifying women. An example of such a man is Jim, Frado father, who, in expressing his wish to “possess” Mag, likens her to a prize: “‘She’d be as much of a prize to me as she’d fall short of coming up to the mark with white folks. … She’s good enough for me, any how’” (Wilson 8). Though Jim is an unknowing adherent of patriarchy – that is, he is ignorant of patriarchal ideology as ideology – his blackness adds a fascinating racial dynamic to his desire to marry Mag. Prevailing social attitudes mandate that Mag is unsuited to marry a white man because she has lost that which makes her most valuable – her virtue. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert asseverates, “[A woman’s] essential virtue ... is that her virtue makes her man ‘great.’ In and of herself, she is neither great nor extraordinary” (Gilbert 816). As a black man, however, Jim lives in an ideological space that is somewhat removed from prevailing social attitudes, which are applicable principally to whites. As Wilson shows us, racism was hardly endemic to the states in which slavery was legal. Even in seemingly progressive New England, African Americans were assailed daily by signs of their perceived inferiority. Thus, whereas most white men would have regarded Mag as akin to

“spoiled goods,” Mag’s pale skin is, for a black man like Jim, a commodity whose value compensates for Mag’s status as a pariah. For a man who is doubtlessly accustomed to

48 racial oppression, Mag’s “virtue” rests not in sexual purity, but in her whiteness. This is a testimony to the resilience and malleability of not only patriarchy, but also ideology as a whole. Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that, no matter how patriarchy is brought about, the burden is repeatedly placed on the woman; that is, that which makes a woman identify as such is also that which contributes to her commodification: her ability to bear children, to produce milk, her hymen, and – in Jim’s case – her white skin.

It is in Mag that Wilson delivers her most audacious indictment of patriarchy, a woman whom Wilson is quick to describe as a pariah, a woman who was seduced by an anonymous charmer, only to be abandoned soon after she accedes to yield to him her virginity: “She surrendered to him a priceless gem, which he proudly garnered as a trophy, with those of other victims, and left her to her fate” (Wilson 5). Wilson reveals here the enormous bias that is inherent to a systematic patriarchy; that a woman must pay the price, or be socially penalized, in the form of either opprobrium or even ostracization, for the misdeeds of the lascivious man who beguiled her, is as unfair as it is illogical. The man is able to walk away, his sexual appetite satiated and his ego appeased, whilst the woman to whom he purported to devote himself must suffer the double punishment of heartbreak (from his abandonment as well as heartbreak from the unexpected demise of her infant) as well as being pilloried and stigmatized: “Mag’s new home was soon contaminated by the publicity of her fall … but she resolved to be circumspect, and try to regain in a measure what she had lost. Then some foul tongue would jest of her shame, and averted looks and cold greetings disheartened her” (Wilson 6). As Wilson implies, such a woman was known to have “fallen,” an ignominious title that ultimately gave rise

49 to its own literary genre. Two of the most famous (or infamous) entries of the fallen woman genre (and which remained immensely popular during Wilson’s life) were

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), and Susannah Rowson’s

Charlotte Temple (1791). In the latter novel, the titular protagonist, like Mag, trusts her seducer’s promises, succumbs, and is subsequently forsaken by the man to whom she has pledged herself. These stories were essentially novelized conduct books, impressing upon women the value of living a “moral” life. By having Frado’s parent also be a “fallen woman,” Wilson manipulates the tropes of the fallen woman genre, striking an unmistakable narrative parallel between racial oppression (experienced by Frado) and gender oppression (experienced by Mag).

As one could probably guess, “fallen woman” is a genre whose title is inspired by the Fall of Man, the biblical story in which God creates Adam, the first man, from dust:

“Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). Soon thereafter, God shapes Eve from Adam’s rib, and, according to Lerner, the very process by which Eve is formed is itself emblematic of women’s status as an ancillary sex:

“Whether [the] interpretation has rested upon the rib as being one of Adam’s ‘lower’ parts, and therefore denoting inferiority, or on the fact that Eve was created from Adam’s flesh and bone, while he was created from earth, the passage has historically had profoundly patriarchal symbolic meaning” (Lerner 183). But patriarchal symbolism in

Genesis does not stop at Eve’s creation, for it is Eve who also happens to be guilty of committing original sin. When God situates Adam and Eve in an idyllic land called the

Garden of Eden, they are invited to enjoy the beauty and plenitude of this paradise on the stipulation that they do not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Unbeknownst to the pair, a sinister serpent is also residing in Eden, and, one day, this serpent approaches Eve alone to induce her to disobey God’s only command. Ironically,

God curses the snake – by whose legerdemain Eve is fooled – whilst Eve is not only cursed, but also is doubly punished: “To the woman [God] said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’” (Genesis 3:16).

For millennia, it has been believed that the Bible is a divinely inspired text, a recording of ancient occurrences, transcribed by God, whose veracities are incontrovertible. Consequently, Western civilization’s understanding of Eve’s being inveigled into eating a forbidden fruit has been startlingly literal. Some nineteenth- century Protestant preachers taught that all women were like their biblical antecedent – that is, weaker, more gullible, more prone to error, and, most egregiously, a conceivable threat to man. To see that the proceedings in Genesis have to served as an excuse to subordinate women, we can look as far back as the second century, to Christian theologian Tertullian, who coined the term eva rediviva, which, when translated from

Latin, means “Eve revived.” For Tertullian, “Every woman is Eve, and Eve is the devil’s gateway and the destroyer of man, who is the image of God. It is because of Eve that

Christ had to die” (Milne 55). Unfortunately, this virtually phobic outlook of women – that is, society’s incapacity to shake the stigmatizing memory of Eve from its general impression of women en bloc – did not alleviate until roughly the late 1600s, when

51 feminist writers like Mary Astell and Judith Murray (in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and Angelina Grimké and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (in the nineteenth century) began to make their voices increasingly heard. On the contrary, as historian

Helen Damico explains, “eva rediviva” was as prevalent as ever in usage during the

European Middle Ages: “What [eva rediviva] means is that the intellectual Middle Ages thought all women as dumb as Eve, who had let herself be swindled out of her rightful portion of Paradise” (Damico 262). Furthermore, feminist biblical scholar Pamela Milne tells us, “More than a thousand years [after Tertullian] Eve provided the justification for executing many women as witches. Women were thought to be prone to witchcraft because witchcraft comes from carnal lust, and carnal lust has been insatiable in women from the time of Eve onward” (Milne 55).

Like most women, white or black, Frado is continuing to pay for Eve’s sins. But because Frado is black, and therefore is susceptible to two layers of oppression, it is vital for her to understand instinctually, if not consciously, that Christianity, the very ideological construct on which she depends for personal improvement, is liable to interpretive malleability. For, if women, and particularly black women, were genuinely inferior – as patriarchy would be quick to suggest – would not any attempt at self- improvement by Frado be but an exercise in futility? Through the power of Wilson’s prose, we, as readers, have experienced vicariously Frado’s torment, but remain objective enough to apprehend that, for Frado to achieve bildung, she must recognize the ideology of Christianity for what it is – as opposed to misrecognizing it a monolithic metanarrative beyond which no reality exists – and that, as a human-made construct, it is not beyond

52 her ability to personalize, or even to reinvent (as Janie and Celie do). The more easily

Frado is able to see Christianity as interpretively malleable, the sooner she will be able to see that Christianity itself was never the source of her oppression, but misogyny and racism under a façade of Christianity. Men, in their conceit, have exploited Eve’s disobedience so as to perpetually browbeat and suppress women, transforming biblical messages into pro-patriarchal (or, as the aforementioned verse from Luke demonstrates, pro-slavery) propaganda.

It is ironic, therefore, that Wilson’s last reference to Christianity is a positive one:

“Nothing turns [Frado] from her steadfast purpose of elevating herself. Reposing on God, she has thus far journeyed securely” (Wilson 72). This proves that Frado, in her unyielding tenacity, has not lost her innermost hunger for a better self. In her ceaseless quest to “elevate herself,” or to increase her development, the narrator essentially maintains that Frado wants her life to be worthy of a bildungsroman. Yet, Frado’s faith in

Christianity – that construct which has been ideologically warped, or reduced to an specious legitimizer of racism and misogyny, keeping Frado, as a consequence, fettered in a prison of patriarchy – has been, due to the recent charity of a friend, revitalized. But

Frado has vacillated too much by this point in her narrative for us to be convinced that she will retain this newly reacquired discipleship; instead, we are led to presume that

Frado’s oscillating allegiances to the Judeo-Christian God will persist, proving that

Christianity will, to some degree, and in some manner, dominate her life as much as it complicates it.

It is not incorrect to argue that, as a fictitious character, Frado fails to transcend

Christianity, and, in turn, Our Nig, as a text, is inchoate as a bildungsroman. But because

Frado is a character on which Wilson is based, we would be remiss if we did not discuss

Wilson herself, who, subsequent to the events of Our Nig, came far closer to achieving bildung. Records discovered by Foreman indicate that, not long after Our Nig was published anonymously, Wilson went on to renounce Christianity in favor of a non- established religion known as spiritualism, a denomination in which devotees communicate with the dead. Literary reviewer Eric Gardner informs us that “Foreman found a ‘Hattie Wilson’ listed as a medium in the Boston Spiritualist newspaper the

Banner of Light in 1867, and then carefully documented her involvement in spiritualism as an ‘eloquent and earnest colored trance medium.’ They discovered that she shared the podium with some of the most prominent spiritualists of the day (Gardner 716). Ann

Braude, in her book Radical Spirits, explains that spiritualism reached the peak of its popularity from the 1840s to the 1920s, and, more intriguingly – but, when we consider

Wilson, not surprisingly – many, if not most, renowned spiritualists were women, suffragists, and abolitionists (Braude 37-38). Randi Lynn Tanglen adds, “Spiritualism did not embrace a formal doctrine and was not an organized denomination, which is probably one characteristic that made it appealing to Wilson (Tanglen 62). Most importantly, spiritualism differed from Protestantism in that the Bible was not a principal source from which wisdom was derived; for spiritualists, sagacity was sought from talking to spirits.

This is key; for, when liberated from that sacred text which promulgates precepts of patriarchy, Wilson had enough freedom to comprehend God in ways that were most meaningful to her. In spiritualism, there can be no “fallen woman,” nor can one racially

54 discriminate, as no such document exists by which to authorize such discrimination. The last forty years of Wilson’s life provide a captivating addendum, or epilogue, to Our Nig; while Frado remained spiritually indecisive and nonplussed by the final page, Wilson’s life in its entirety, should it ever be dramatized, would make for a complete bildungsroman.

Chapter 3: Celie’s Transcendence of Christianity in The Color Purple

Thus far we have discussed Our Nig as an incomplete bildungsroman due to

Frado’s inability, due to a colonized consciousness, to disassociate Christianity from the racist and misogynist principles with which it is infused in her culture. In this chapter, we will examine how Alice Walker’s The Color Purple represents the most complete bildungsroman of the three narratives that are being analyzed in this thesis, thanks to

Celie’s transformative journey from an emotionally blind ideological adherent to a fully literate, multifaceted, and autonomous woman.

If “bildungsroman” translates to “novel of formation,” then The Color Purple is more of a novel of transformation. Celie’s metamorphosis from an ideologically embryonic life-form trapped in patriarchy’s cocoon to a sovereign individual can be marked by a trio of crucial bildung moments: her discovery of an actively sexual self, her discourse with Shug Avery concerning the idea of God as a white male, and, finally, her open display of aggressivity toward her abusive husband, Albert, under whose roof she assiduously perseveres. I also argue that Celie’s spiritual development reveals itself not only narratively, but also, because The Color Purple is an epistolary novel, structurally; for, as Celie develops ideologically, her development is mirrored in how she expresses herself as well as to whom her letters are directed. It is also important to note that, unlike

Frado, Christianity itself does not subjugate Celie; instead, the need for Celie to transcend her Christian dogma derives from an absence of – as opposed to an oppression from – the very deity to which she supplicates, and yet which does nothing to assuage her incessant

56 suffering. This is an ironic, if not a downright polemic, statement, for there appears to be a consensus amongst scholars of The Color Purple that, because the Judeo-Christian God is almost always visualized as a white male, He is a root cause – if not the root cause – of much of Celie’s suffering due to her inability to differentiate between the maleness of her abusers and the purported maleness of God. Such scholars include Jeannine Thyreen, who writes, “[For Celie], the Divine is reduced to a being that is identified with the dominant, oppressive white patriarchy, which is both racist and sexist” (Thyreen 51).

Celie’s confusion is exacerbated by her prescribed gender role; to wit, she expected to behave submissively toward all males in her life, corporeal and incorporeal alike. While there is an abundance of validity to such claims, I contest that the unanimous conception of God as White Male works as a hindrance to Celie’s ability to achieve bildung merely because such categorizing makes Him, for a black woman like Celie, sorely absent during moments when He is in most dire need, an argument with which Lindsey Tucker, in her invaluable essay, entitled “Emergent Woman, Emergent Text,” agrees: “Celie can only write to God, who, as a white male listener, is ill-equipped to hear what she has to say”

(Tucker 82).

If The Color Purple is a novel of transformation, it is because the reader is introduced to Celie as a sad fourteen-year-old captive of patriarchy, a woman so oppressed, so unequivocally nescient, so devoid of a sense of self, and whose consciousness is so colonized, that even the remotest possibility for ideological advancement seems impossible. Indeed, Celie’s inert status early on in The Color Purple recalls a quote from Gerda Lerner, who states that, historically, more women have not

57 objected to patriarchy because, “Women have for millennia participated in the process of their own subordination because they have been psychologically shaped so as to internalize the idea of their own inferiority. The unawareness of their own history of struggle has been one of the major means of keeping women subordinate” (Lerner 218).

Celie, similarly, has been kept subordinate by constant physical and sexual abuse. In fact,

Celie endures greater quantities of abuse than either Frado or Janie; what’s more, Celie suffers greater varieties of abuse, as she is the only protagonist in this thesis who is raped, impregnated by her rapist (who is, no less, her presumed father), and, ultimately, to have her two children sold to strangers. Truly, Celie is subjected to a degree of suffering that makes even Frado’s years of servitude come across as tame by comparison. The Color

Purple, more than either Our Nig – whose protagonist is oppressed primarily by racial ideology – or Their Eyes Were Watching God – whose protagonist is oppressed almost exclusively by patriarchy – exposes the dual layers of oppression against which countless black women fought. Celie is overworked and underappreciated; she is, therefore, like

Frado, an indentured servant, not because of her race, but because of her sex – a servant of patriarchy. This does not mean, however, that Celie, because she is never seen outside of her all-black community, is exempt from being victimized because of her skin color, for one of the most paradoxical and fascinating aspects of The Color Purple rests in how fellow members of Celie’s race view her as inferior simply because her skin is darker shade of black than most. Hence, as a literary protagonist, Celie is Walker’s response to

Janie, who is half-white, and, as a result, the recipient of special treatment from such people as Mrs. Turner. Consider Carrie and Kate, Albert’s sisters, who, when describing

Annie Julia, Albert’s former wife, remark, “[She] not so pretty. … Just that head of hair.

She too black” (Walker 20). This shows that “colonized conscious” is a term that need not be restricted lone individuals, as it is also applicable to entire societies.

That said, it is not insignificant, nor is it surprising, that, when the reader initially stumbles upon Celie’s name – that sole linguistic sliver of a barely-surviving identity – it is not spoken by Celie herself, but by a dominant male who is in the midst of transacting her: “But I can let you have Celie” (Walker 7) (note that, because Walker does not use quotation marks in The Color Purple, I will not place single quotes within double quotes when citing character dialogue). We, Walker’s readers, meet Celie not as a typical adolescent in the midst of self-discovery, but as a voiceless and un-cherished sexual receptacle that is transacted impassively, an ideological prisoner for whom self-discovery is a prohibited freedom. Thus, Celie, like her literary predecessors, is commodified; unlike Janie and Frado, Celie, like countless victims of sexual and physical abuse, comes to accept completely, or at least internalize, her ostensive inferiority, and, therefore, her powerlessness. Even Frado, who is whipped regularly and severely, retains a bit of recalcitrance in her general temperament, or as Wilson says, “[Frado] was of willful, determined nature, a stranger to fear” (Wilson 17). There is little, if any, evidence in The

Color Purple which suggests that, in her earlier years, Celie shares Frado’s propensity for fearlessness and rebellion; on the contrary, to meet Celie initially is to behold a woman who subsists as an embodiment of the consequences of a repressive ideology, a woman whose burning lust for life has long since cooled – that is, if it ever existed – whose yearnings for autonomy have been subdued, and any feelings of high dudgeon have been

59 effectively squelched by patriarchy, or her acquiescence thereunto. It is because Frado preserve her inherent tenacity that she is able to make such ontological inquiries as, “Is there a heaven for the black? She knew there was one for James, and Aunt Abby, and all good white people; but was there any for blacks?” (Wilson 47). Young Celie, conversely, has no such intellectual or spiritual dilemmas, for she, unlike Frado, wholly imbibes

Christianity’s tenets just as much as she perceives her status as commodity (or as victim) to be part of an inexorable fate or divine plan: “Well, sometime Mr. ______git on me pretty hard. I have to talk to Old Maker. But he my husband. I shrug my shoulders. This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways” (Walker 42). In other words, if Celie fails to ask the same ontologically related questions as Frado, it is because she has not been adequately equipped with the cognitive tools to do so. It takes the outside influences of women like Shug – that is, women who are assertive as well as candid in their assertiveness – to prevent Celie from remaining an ideological automaton by the conclusion of her narrative, so completely has she internalized her status as commodity.

This is not to imply that Celie willingly accepts her circumstances, but merely that she views herself as incapable of making even the smallest change; Celie is powerless precisely because she has been programmed by patriarchy to see herself as such.

But the extent to which Celie’s consciousness is colonized is also evinced in her unawareness that a concept like bildung even exists. This obliviousness it augmented by her lack of formal schooling, a privilege which, as we have discussed, was received even by Frado: “Three months of schooling, summer and winter, [Frado] enjoyed for three years” (Wilson 21). Alas, Celie has no such opportunity; what little schooling Celie does

60 receive comes from her sister, Nettie: “[Nettie] helping me with spelling and everything else she think I need to know. No matter what happen, Nettie steady try to teach me what go on in the world. And she a good teacher too” (Walker 16). Unfortunately, Celie loses even this scant pedagogical resource when an embittered Albert forces Nettie to move out his house because she is persistent in her refusal to capitulate to his sexual advances. One would suspect that this loss of Nettie, whose sororal company has hitherto served as

Celie’s only outlet for undiluted positivity, would incentivize her to confront Albert about his cruel decision. Upon their parting, Celie articulates her sorrow, not just in regards to their separation, but also in regards to her being obliged to obey gender norms on a daily basis: “[Our parting is] worse than [being buried], I think. If I was buried, I wouldn’t have to work” (Walker 17). Ironically, in the following chapter, Celie is complimented by

Albert’s own sisters for her housekeeping abilities and, in so doing, Albert’s sisters express their approval of preconceived gender norms, or her ability to be an “angel of her house”: “When a woman marry she spose to keep a decent house and a clean family”

(Walker 19).

As opposed to making an attempt to resist Albert’s verdict, irrespective of how injurious that verdict may be to her self-esteem or overall happiness, Celie’s sorrow is alleviated, her anger palliated, when she tells Nettie (as well as herself) that, “I just say,

Never mine, never mine, long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along” (Walker 17).

As this quote establishes, religion – that is, the belief in the reality of a higher power, for whose presence a battered and lonely woman can only hope – functions as a means of support. Tucker opines that Celie’s reliance on the Judeo-Christian God is demonstrative

61 of her naïveté, and that, “As she soon learns, at least on an instinctive level, if her text, her creation of selfhood, is to proceed, the male text of the deity must be rewritten in female terms” (Tucker 84). As readers, we are tempted to sympathize with Celie’s need to inject herself with a dose of spirituality in order to ease the pain that she feels all too frequently. As The Color Purple progresses, however, we begin to realize – as Celie herself eventually realizes – that she must, like Frado before her, see Christianity as an ideological construct that is – like all ideological constructs – interpretively malleable, and, once this is accomplished, to revise her preexisting view of “god” so as to allow for the possibility of bildung. For Celie, praying or writing to the Judeo-Christian God produces an effect that is, at best, adiaphorous. Christianity, to speak metaphorically, acts as a roadblock in Celie’s route to bildung, and because this roadblock cannot be removed,

Celie must perforce seek a secondary route, one that will be revealed to her by Shug.

If Christianity is a hindrance to Celie’s bildung, it is not because Christianity itself operates as an abettor to Celie’s oppression. Indeed, at no time does Albert cite Scripture while beating Celie in order to justify such mistreatment, as Mrs. Bellmont does to Frado in Our Nig. (It cannot be ignored, however, that God, for Celie’s “Pa,” serves as a lazy pretext, or conceptual scapegoat, to deny, even to himself, any culpability in his sexual transgressions against Celie. As a case in point, Pa reports to Albert that Celie’s infertility is not due to his violent rapes, but because, “God done fixed her” (Walker 8). Comments such as this are what cause Celie to perceptually fuse, or confuse, the maleness of her victimizers and the maleness of the Judeo-Christian God.) Be that as it may, Celie has yet to apprehend consciously that to await God’s relief is to defer a chance for bildung. By

62 reminding herself that an omniscient and benevolent deity is guarding her, Celie is placing an ideological bandage over her psychological wounds; but, as Celie herself comes to recognize, putting a protective layering over, or concealing, one’s grief is not analogous to healing it. Though traditional Christianity is an ideological construct on which Celie can depend to reconcile herself to her oppressive situation, this reconciliation, subsequent to innumerable beatings by numerous men, proves to be a remedy that is inadequate for the severity of her plight. As Celie moves closer to what may potentially be her breaking point, she comes to comprehend that adjustments far more dramatic and palpable must be made to her life so its quality may be improved, eliminating elements which are deleterious, and adding elements, such as Shug’s transcendentalist philosophies, which are salubrious.

It is inarguable that Shug, more than any other character in The Color Purple, serves as a catalyst for Celie’s transformative odyssey. But if Shug is responsible for the commencement of Celie’s bildung, then it is Sofia Butler who is responsible for bringing the possibility of bildung to the forefront of Celie’s consciousness. Dispositionally, Sofia has much in common with Shug, as both women are self-assured, aggressive, and are each, in their own manner, defiant of conventional gender norms. In fact, the gender roles in Sofia’s marriage are largely reversed, as Sofia displays her aforesaid characteristics, which are almost universally deemed to be incongruous to her gender, whilst Harpo, the man to whom Sofia is bound matrimonially, is comparatively docile, and therefore emasculated. This also happens to undermine any authority of the Bible, whose patriarchal precepts dictate, “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in

63 the Lord” (Colossians 3:18). In addition, Sofia has, like Janie from Their Eyes Were

Watching God, a pale complexion, an attribute which helps men to look upon her more favorably: “She pretty, [Harpo] tell me. Bright. Smart? Naw. Bright skin” (Walker 29).

Interestingly, Sofia’s physical and behavioral traits combine to create a person who is essentially Celie’s antipode, and, consequently, a person of whom Celie becomes quickly jealous. As readers, we get a glimpse of Celie’s envy of Sofia when she insists, “Harpo so black he think she bright, but she ain’t that bright. Clear medium brown skin, gleam on it like on good furniture” (Walker 30). Likening Sofia to “good furniture” is Celie’s simplistic way of projecting her frustrations on a woman whom she secretly, if subconsciously, admires; Celie covets what Sofia ostensibly takes for granted, and, because she cannot have what Sofia has, Celie endeavors to commodify her by equating her to some inanimate, prosaic object, thereby relegating Sofia to her own subpar status, just as she herself has been, and continues to be, treated like a utilitarian commodity.

But Celie’s jealousy is brought to dangerous new heights when Harpo approaches her for advice on what to do to “make Sofia mind” (35), to which Celie, against her better judgment, responds by telling Harpo to “beat her” (36). Clearly, Celie underestimates

Sofia’s resolve when Harpo’s face is seen the next day to be cut and bruised, showing that not only did Sofia defend herself, but also, much to the embarrassment of Harpo – who tries so valiantly to adhere to classical gender norms – likely emerged triumphant in their domestic fracas. When an angry Sofia demands to know why Celie encouraged

Harpo to assault her, Celie, whose conscience is riddled with guilt, confesses, “I say it cause I’m a fool, [Celie] say. I say it cause I’m jealous of you. I say it cause you do what

I can’t. What’s that? [Sofia] say. Fight [Celie] say” (Walker 40). In reply to this confession, Sofia, whose anger has been molded into compassion, observes, “You remind me of my mama. She under my daddy thumb. Naw, she under my daddy foot. Anything he say, goes. She never say nothing back. She never stand up for herself” (Walker 41).

This a transcendent moment for Celie, even if it is not necessarily a moment of bildung, because her eyes have been opened to the possibility that she may shield herself from the man by whom she is so callously attacked, a possibility that was never offered to her heretofore, not even by Nettie, who comes across as positively rebellious when compared to her sister. To be sure, Celie catches a glimpse of a world free from ignominy and abuse, a world wherein all types of bildung are possible. But in order for Celie to arrive to this world, her consciousness must be decolonized. The fact that Celie’s consciousness remains colonized by patriarchy, even after being advised that she should stand up against her abusers, is made evident in how she describes her allegiance to her father (the man who, lest it be forgotten, is the source for the majority of Celie’s life suffering): “I can’t even remember the last time I felt mad … Couldn’t be mad at my daddy cause he my daddy, Bible say, Honor father and mother no matter what” (Walker 42). Sofia does little to initiate Celie’s bildung, save to recommend bluntly, “You ought to bash Mr.

______head open” (Walker 42). Indeed, the responsibility of beginning Celie’s bildung will fall on the shoulders of Shug, a spiritual cicerone without whom bildung for Celie would have been an impossibility. Whereas Sofia is interpreted as assertive, Shug is an absolute iconoclast.

It is no accident that the same woman who aids Celie in breaking free of the ideological construct of which she is a prisoner is also a woman who suffers from criticized by a large segment of patriarchy. The local preacher, for example, rebukes

Shug for being, “a strumpet in short skirts, smoking cigarettes, drinking gin. Singing for money and taking other women mens. Talk bout slut, hussy, heifer and streetcleaner”

(Walker 44). This reproof stems from Shug’s blatant disregard of preconceived gender norms. The only people who praise Shug, it seems, are men like Albert, which reveals an enormous double standard in men’s overall perception of women. If Shug is lionized, it is neither for her independent mindset nor for the fortitude that such a mindset requires, but purely for her physical beauty. Thus, patriarchy attempts, like some insidious virus, to negate the accomplishment of Shug’s sovereignty over herself by commodifying her, reducing her to a prized article to be sought – a l’objet d’art. This attempt proves itself to be in vain, however, for what makes Shug such a provocative personality – and what makes her such a perfect guide for Celie – is that she embraces her own commodification, and, in so doing, transcends it. For instance, Shug is commonly seen in attire that is risqué: “Shug wearing a gold dress that show her titties near bout to the nipple” (Walker 80). By flaunting her physicality like a sexual advertisement, Shug is stripping the male gaze of its power to oppress. Of course, any male gaze increases in intensity so long as Shug chooses to wear such revealing apparel, but the pride with which it is worn subverts that intensity, sending a message to the gazer that Shug’s approval of her own body overpowers any man’s desire to commodify it. Needless to say, this does not stop concupiscent men from congregating around Shug like moths around a

66 flame, all of who are heedless of the notion that their presence and attentiveness only serves to empower her.

Correlatively, sexuality itself is, for Shug, a form of feminine liberty. Shug’s anatomy is an asset of which she is not only appreciative, but also with which she is intimately. Shug enjoys sex unapologetically. Just as Shug is unmindful of what is sartorially decorous, so too is she unmindful of her role of “angel of the house,” a title for which chastity is a foremost requisite. But Shug is not as interested in being an angel of any house so much as being “angel of herself,” or, so far as Celie is concerned, simply

“angel.” Thus, what better role model can there be for Celie than Shug, a woman who is versed anatomically and sexually; for, in order for Celie’s bildung to commence, she must be ideologically deconstructed down to her most fundamental, or primordial, level, effectively unlearning all that which she learned, particularly about sex. This is most apparent in the chapter in which Shug invites Celie to look at her own genitalia in a mirror – that ubiquitous symbol of reflection, or rumination, in female literature – an inducement that is made after Celie’s admission that, for her, sex with Albert is perfunctory act to which she has a strong aversion, not only because she feels little love for Albert, but also because, as a rape victim, Celie is a woman for whom sex and violence are intertwined inextricably. A woman as sexually liberated is needed to educate

Celie on sex, that it can be just as enjoyable for a woman as it is for a man, and that it is an act that during which partners should be respected equally, and idea that is all but foreign to Shug’s sexual apprentice.

When Celie admits that, for her, to perform sex is to perform a prescribed gender role, an amazed Shug retorts, “Why Miss Celie … you still a virgin” (Walker 77). This is a decisive moment in The Color Purple, as multiple doors are opened for the sexually repressed Celie -- who heretofore was ignorant of this part of her anatomy -- doors that will lead to corridors which will lead to a healthier mentality that regards her corporeal self not as an object to be used and discarded, but as a bodily manifestation of self- acceptance and even pride: “‘It a lot prettier than you thought, ain’t it?’ [Shug] say from the door” (Walker 78). Celie’s sexual enlightenment emboldens her to begin her transformative journey; for, before Celie can proceed to the more advanced stages of her bildung, she must acknowledge herself at her most primal; that is to say, to concede that she, like all humans, has urges which are innate and which therefore can be harmful to deny, even if such urges contradict prevailing social attitudes that frown upon women, such as Shug, who are unafraid to actuate their sexual agency. This radical idea, which instigates Celie’s transition from one who adheres to an ideology of whose oppressive underpinnings she remains unaware to a subscriber of a more personalized ideology – that is, one that is tailored to her own needs – is one to which literary scholar Daniel

Ross, in his essay “”Celie in the Looking Glass,” attests: “In discovering and accepting with pride her own body, Celie initiates a desire for selfhood” (Ross 38). Perhaps more importantly, Celie’s attention is drawn not only by the appearance of her own genitals, but also the function of which her genitals are capable, thereby permitting her, like Shug, to take a more active role during sex as opposed to reserving herself as a display of sexual passivity.

Once her most primal facets are deconstructed, and subsequently reconstructed,

Celie is ready to graduate to another, more complicated, phase of her bildung. This is a phase that goes beyond a person’s animalistic impulses – such as sexuality – to a uniquely human element – namely, ideology, and especially religious ideology. Celie’s current ideology, or her existing knowledge of what constitutes “god,” must be, like her more primal aspects, deconstructed and rebuilt, and it is also in this area that Shug arrives at Celie’s rescue. Just as Shug changes Celie’s outlook on sex, so too does she inform

Celie, during one pivotal discussion, that “god” need be neither white nor even male.

There are several clues prior to this moment, however, which suggest that Celie, on a deeply subliminal level, attempts to deconstruct God herself. Such an effort is shown in the aforementioned quote in which Celie spells out “god” when speaking to Sofia about her dependence on Him to make her own suffering more bearable: “Long as I can spell

G-o-d I got somebody along” (Walker 17). It is no coincidence that Celie unconsciously spells out “god” at the exact instant in which she is made aware of the possibility of bildung; for, as Celie sees, through Sofia’s example, that choices are available to her – choices of which she was previously unaware, such as that of self defense – she inquires, at the deepest recesses of her psyche, why God – whom she, like most of society, imagines to be a white man – did not himself present her with options of such viability.

Thus, Celie struggles to deconstruct “god” in her own rudimentary way by dissecting

Him linguistically, taking apart the three letters which, when amalgamated, create a mental impression of a vague and distant entity that she presumes to be her racial and sexual opposite.

Celie’s linguistic disassembling of “god” continues into the next chapter when, instead of starting her missive by writing “Dear God,” as she normally does, she begins by writing that which is fresh in her mind – that is, a burgeoning (but still subconscious) curiosity as to what sort of mysterious and inhuman phenomenon, or heavenly presence, to which the letters “g-o-d” refer when combined. The fact that Celie even attempts to engage in such deconstructing, even subliminally, suggests that her ideological programming, extensive as it is, is not irreversible. Here we may recall Ferdinand de

Saussure and semiotics, a science that claims that words are signs, or symbols, and each sign is as arbitrarily conceived as it is subjective. Hence, if language is a vocal mechanism by which humans make meaning, then any “meaning” of an individual word is reliant on a culture’s tacit agreement of it, or as Saussure himself says, “[Language] is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound- images, and in which both parts of the sign are psychological” (Saussure 59). By “both parts,” Saussure explains that every word (or sign) has two “sides”: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the word itself, which is no more than an arbitrary collection of letters (or symbols), and which bears no fundamental relation to the signified. Saussure himself describes the signified as, “The psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses” (Saussure 61). The subjective element of language can be ascertained when the signifier “tree” is spoken by three culturally dissimilar persons. Upon hearing “tree,” one person may envisage an oak, the second may envision a pine, and the third may visualize a palm or willow.

Regardless of what variety of tree comes to one’s mind when the word is uttered, a tree is a tangible and visible object, and is therefore much easier to delineate linguistically. A concept like “god,” however – that is, an abstract concept – needs far more lexical precision to define properly and accurately. In spite of this fact, Occidental civilization has assumed God to be a white male, as is evidenced by the surfeit of paintings of Him, particularly during the Renaissance (the most famous of which is arguably Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, wherein the eponymous male is as white as his Creator, who Himself is depicted as not only white, but also elderly and bearded, like an average Italian paterfamilias). It is here that we may aver that Shug has an ideological edge over most of her contemporaries – white or black – in that her correlating signified to the signifier “god” is not the same as the majority of Americans, for whom “god” evokes images of some senescent Caucasian. Shug has long since adopted – perhaps, at one point, to save her own eroding sanity – a refreshingly progressive perspective of “god,” one that is decidedly Emersonian in its origin. Ralph

Waldo Emerson, a leading transcendentalist, believed that divinity could, in fact, be discernable to human eyes, and that such godliness could be discovered most abundantly in nature. For Emerson, nature was a type of “body” for God, or a sublime exterior by which He could be viewed. In Nature, Emerson demonstrates the tenets of transcendentalism by postulating that humans and wind are one: “From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind”

(Emerson 219). For Shug, God and nature are synonymous; the latter is but proof of the former’s existence.

Nonetheless, even Emerson was a white male, and Shug, as a result, must broaden his definition of “nature” – that is, to go beyond stars, wind, or some beautifully variegated cluster of leaves – to include that which is most significant to her: the female body, a marvel which, Shug would undoubtedly argue, is itself a product of nature. In her book The Second Sex, renowned feminist Simone de Beauvoir is dubious of comparing women to nature: “Woman [is seen] as flesh. …Thus, woman is related to nature, she incarnates it: vale of blood, open rose, siren, the curve of a hill, she represents to man the fertile soil, the sap, the material beauty. … She holds the keys to poetry. … In any case she appears as the privileged Other” (Beauvoir 262). Beauvoir asserts that to liken women to nature is to rob them of their individuality and humanity precisely because viewing women relative to nature is to view them in opposition to men, as if each woman is a lush acre of land to be cultivated by Man; any piece of land, however lush it may be, means little in and of itself if it cannot be accompanied by a cultivator. Beauvoir, it seems, did not, or perchance could not, foresee a woman like Shug, who embraces this traditionally male idea, and, because she is a woman, transcends it. Indeed, coaching

Celie on how to see value in her own body – that her physique is one of which she does not need to be ashamed, irrespective of men calling her ugly – is Shug’s preliminary step to making Celie an Emersonian proselyte, and, in the process, modifying Celie’s mental impression, or signified, when the signifier “god” is uttered. But Shug is also Emersonian in her promiscuity and general approach to sexuality, which is blatantly aggressive, and

72 which, therefore, contradicts patriarchy’s creed that women must remain chaste until marriage and, when married, must exercise sexual restraint and passivity. When Shug humorously and crassly hints that her first Emersonian experience was akin to an orgasm,

Celie’s reacts in an appalled, even offended, manner, which shows how indelibly Celie, in spite of her desire to elevate her mind beyond her current belief system, is rooted in that very system. To this, Shug says assuredly, “God love all them [sexual] feelings.

That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ‘em you enjoys

’em a lot more” (Walker 196). Thus, for Shug, not only is a woman’s body a reifying emblem of nature, but the act of sex is, likewise, a performative extension of nature’s gifts.

In this respect, Shug also shows a great audacity in her willingness to be a nonconformist, a trait about which Emerson comments in Self-Reliance, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” (Emerson 269), and, “A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. … For non-conformity the world whips you with its displeasure” (Emerson

273). To be sure, Celie’s community society may “whip” her for decision to cease conforming to her prescribed gender role; be that as it may, it is preferable to be whipped figuratively than it is to be whipped literally, as Celie so ordinarily is by Albert.

Exacerbating the sting of whipping is Celie’s conviction that God, too, is “whipping” her through His allowance of so much suffering, thereby revealing the degree to which Celie conflates the oppression brought upon her Albert and her male God: “I’m so shame of

73 myself, [Celie] say. And the Lord he done whip me little bit too” (Walker

42).

Shug’s Emersonian piety alone makes her a nonconformist. She is cognizant that, as a black woman, she cannot possibly worship a deity who is a white male, given how endless streams of men – both white and black – have doubtlessly mistreated her sisters as well as herself. For Shug, the Judeo-Christian God is symbolic of – or, as a white male, a literal personification of – the dual layers of oppression to which black women were subjected -- racism and sexism: “Ain’t no way to read the bible and not think God white, [Shug] say. … When I found out God was white, and a man, I lost interest”

(Walker 195). Consequently, as Celie’s friend and ultimate love interest, it is Shug’s duty to edify Celie by changing her signified when the signifier “god” is uttered, from a generic white man to an image that is far more personal, and therefore more relevant, to her. More than halfway through The Color Purple, Celie proves that, despite her endeavors to deconstruct God linguistically, she has not come any closer to acquiring a transcendent view of Him: “The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown” (Walker 192). When

Shug asks Celie what she believes God looks like, or what form He takes, Celie’s answer could comes from what could be a textbook of biblical clichés: “He big and old and tall and graybearded and white. He wear white robes and go barefooted. Blue eyes? [Shug] ast. Sort of bluish-gray. Cool. White lashes” (Walker 194). It should be reiterated that

Celie’s need to personally reinterpret Christianity arises not because Christianity itself actively oppresses her, but because the Judeo-Christian God has been habitually absent

74 when her need of Him was greatest. (Even so, it can be easily contended that God can only be negligent for so long before such negligence itself evolves into a form of abuse, or, at the very least, an enabler of Celie’s oppression.) For Celie, a principal joy of

Emersonianism is that, because God is materialized in nature, He can never be genuinely absent, not only because the elements of nature can be perceived by human senses, but also because humans are themselves elements of nature. Thus, as an Emersonian, Celie comes to believe that she is physically as well as metaphysically affixed to God Himself, whom Emerson appropriately calls the “Universal Being,” and who is divested of either race or gender:

There I feel that nothing can befal me in life, – no disgrace, no calamity,

(leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare

ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,

– all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am

nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through

me; I am part or particle of God. (Emerson 217)

Such a relationship provides a heavy contrast to Celie’s connection to the Judeo-Christian

God, a deity that, because it is almost always depicted as a white male, serves as a reminder to readers (and eventually to a metamorphosed Celie) of how men have reconceptualized the divine image to accommodate their patriarchal (and, in the case of white men, racial) agendas. Surely, mankind has created God in His own image, not the other way around.

Thus, Shug is the key ingredient so vital to making The Color Purple a true bildungsroman, a character without whom Celie would have doomed to decipher those three random letters – “g-o-d” – and the enigma that they combine to make, on her own, almost surely becoming lost repeatedly along her way, like a hamster on a spiritual wheel, going nowhere. Fortunately, Celie does have Shug to help her in her bildung, and she does so by telling Celie that her current view of God originates from, “The white folks’ white bible” (Walker 194). Notice Shug’s reiteration of “white,” an adjective which, when added, conjures a sense of “otherness,” and which, Shug hopes, will lead

Celie to be more Emersonian in her self reliance. Unsurprisingly, the notion that God is racially biased is one to which Celie protests vehemently (and this, in turn, again demonstrates the extent to which Celie has been inculcated by Christianity): “Shug!

[Celie] say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it” (Walker 194).

Shug’s solution is to introduce Celie to her Emersonian philosophies; to wit, that “god” need not be found in a white man, nor in any man at all, but in the various and wonderful aspects of nature: “[Shug] say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air.

Then birds. … [Then] one day when I was sitting quiet … it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed” (Walker 196). Like Emerson before her, Shug’s religion is to consistently recognize and appreciate nature’s splendor. Of course, blasphemy for a disciple of

Emerson would mean to overlook some of nature’s subtler displays of beauty: “It pisses

God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and you don’t notice it”

(Walker 196). As readers, we realize that Shug is a woman to whose free spiritedness the

76 ideologically inchoate Celie should aspire, and on whose perspicacity Celie must rely so as to unfetter herself from the painful shackles of patriarchy. Though it takes quite a bit of convincing on her part, Shug is ultimately successful in altering Celie’s signified associated with the signifier “god,” making The Color Purple a complete bildungsroman, a claim that can be substantiated by the addressee of Celie’s last letter, which has adopted a markedly more Emersonian tone: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear everything. Dear God” (Walker 285). In her essay, “From Monotheism to

Pantheism” Stacie Lynn Hankinson posits that Celie’s newly acquired Emersonian ideology is essentially a pantheistic view of God: “Celie’s conversion from a monotheistic view of God (or traditional Christianity) to a more pantheistic outlook represents … her movement from feelings of oppression under … patriarchy into a sense of … self-acceptance at which she arrives by novel’s end” (Hankinson 320).

But before Celie can reach her moment of bildung that brings about this self- acceptance, she must pass one final test: she must utilize her newfound sense of selfhood to give her the courage to enact her agency whenever Albert – or, for that matter, any patriarch – attempts to subjugate her. Such an opportunity presents itself when Shug announces over dinner that she and Celie intend to move to Memphis together. Suffice to say, this plan goes against the wishes of Albert: “Over my dead body, Mr. ______say”

(Walker 199). It is this remark – this barely veiled threat – that pushes Celie over a proverbial edge, provoking her to exhibit enough agency to combat the forces of patriarchy which for so long have kept her behaviorally subdued: “It’s time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need” (Walker

199). As readers, we cannot want to cheer when we come across this line, for this is the instant in which Celie proves that she has completed her conversion to Emersonianism, moving from a prescribed ideological space in which only oppression was known to an ideological space of her own design – an ideological room of her own, to paraphrase

Virginia Woolf – which she aptly labels “Creation.” Shocked by this unexpected display of aggressivity, and infuriated that a woman as lowly as Celie should so openly challenge him, Albert resorts immediately to physical assault – his default method of reasserting his dominance – a maneuver that is repelled successfully by her: “Mr. ______reach over to slap me. I jab my case knife in his hand. You bitch, he say” (Walker 200). Hence, this

Celie, who is reborn, is able to defend herself not only verbally, but physically as well.

Later, as Celie prepares to drive off to Memphis, a dejected and desperate Albert tries futilely to remind Celie of the physical characteristics which, historically, men have exploited to justify their oppression of her: “What you got? You ugly. You skinny. You shape funny” (Walker 205). Celie’s response to Albert’s rancor, which is said with aplomb, is magic, and is demonstrative of her Emersonianism, which itself begets her independence: “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook. … But I’m here.

Amen, say Shug. Amen, amen” (Walker 207). In this case, Celie is going beyond mere self defense; for, by saying “I’m here,” Celie is reaffirming her own validity, not only to

Albert – from whose attempts at abuse she is forevermore secure – but also, more vitally, to herself. Indeed, to preach “I am here” can be regarded as a sort of Emersonian gospel, an analogy to Christianity that is reinforced by Shug’s follow-up of “amen,” an utterance that is said customarily at the conclusion of Christian sermons.

The momentous scene in which Celie is compelled to defy Albert – perhaps

Celie’s largest moment of bildung – is adumbrated throughout The Color Purple. For example, when Celie learns that Albert has been hiding Nettie’s letters from her, she becomes so enraged that she contemplates murder (a thought which echoes Frado’s whim to murder Mrs. Bellmont upon realizing that she possesses an ability for self defense):

“How I’m gon keep from killing him” (Walker 144), to which a more cool-headed Shug responds, almost paradoxically, by invoking Christ and His mandates: “Hard to be Christ too, say Shug. But he manage. Remember that. Thou Shalt Not Kill, He said” (144). This line is important, as it prompts readers not to forget that Shug, despite her adherence to

Emersonianism, has not repudiated Christianity, but simply uses Emersonianism to tailor her existing Christian beliefs, so that her needs as a black woman can be accommodated.

Thus, for Shug – and, eventually, for Celie – transcending Christianity is not the same as abjuring it: “Just because I don’t harass it like some peoples us know don’t mean I ain’t got religion” (Walker 192).

Much of what makes The Color Purple such a captivating work of art is that it lends itself so well to structuralist criticism. Celie’s spiritual pilgrimage – her bildung – can be detected by her increasing capabilities as a writer. This is not to suggest that

Celie’s spelling and syntax improves over time – it does not. What does improve, however, is Celie’s capacity to engage in concepts, which, prior to meeting Shug, would likely have been too complex or distressing for her to discuss, and about which she, consequently, would have remained silent. Such silence manifests itself by the brevity of

Celie’s letters to God toward the beginning of The Color Purple. It is no coincidence that

Celie is so brief when recording the traumatic events of her adolescence; in spite of her efforts to heal her psychological wounds by means of writing – for writing is Celie’s only vehicle for self-expression – some wounds are simply too deep, and therefore too painful, to confront alone. Celie’s inability – or maybe it is more accurate to call it unwillingness

– to talk about her ordeals in detail parallels Wilson’s choice to employ a heterodiegetic narrator when writing her own autobiography. In chapter one, we discussed that Wilson’s heterodiegesis is indicative of a latent refusal to speak directly about her sufferings, either because she continues to internalize ideas of her own inferiority, or because to tell her life’s tale autodiegetically – that is, to relive her agonizing days as a servant to Mrs.

Bellmont – would be too excruciating; hence, Our Nig, because it is a novel about

Wilson, is incomplete as a bildungsroman. Celie’s brevity is Walker’s creative equivalent to Wilson’s heterodiegesis; just as Wilson’s heterodiegetic narrator is structurally suggestive of her repression, Celie’s lack of narration, or the brevity of her opening letters, is suggestive of a similar repression. Through Nettie, we come to discover that

Celie’s taciturnity is caused by shame, a sentiment felt all too commonly by victims of abuse: “[Nettie] remember one time [Celie] said [her] life made [her] feel so ashamed you couldn’t even talk about it to God” (Walker 130).

Just as Celie’s early letters are conspicuously succinct, the very sentences of which these letters are comprised are so short and rudimentarily composed that a reader could mistake Celie for a small child: “I keep hoping he fine somebody to marry. I see him looking at my little sister. She scared. But I say I’ll take care of you. With God help”

(Walker 3). By the end of the novel, Celie’s epistles not only become, as a whole, much

80 longer, but they also possess an enhanced descriptiveness, prolixity, and even lyricism; as

Celie progresses in her conversion to Emersonianism – away from that white, male God to which Oppression itself is linked – she relinquishes much of her need to repress her feelings, and, in so doing, we, alongside Shug, receive a clearer image of Celie’s past sufferings. Consider the vividness with which Celie describes how she felt, physically and mentally, following one of “Pa’s” rapes: “Seem like it all come back to me, laying there in Shug arms. … How it stung while I finish trimming his hair. How the blood drip down my leg and mess up my stocking. How he don’t never look at me straight after that” (Walker 112). This graphic detailing is a far cry from Celie’s earlier language, which was almost childlike in its terseness.

Celie’s linguistic development also emboldens her to address Albert by his name; for, throughout most of The Color Purple, Celie refers to Albert only as “Mr. ______.”

Here we may perceive that not only does Celie identify Albert solely by his honorific – thereby highlighting the social imbalances inherent in a patriarchal relationship – but also that the ensuing blank line aesthetically denotes attributes which, during the first half of

The Color Purple, are lacking in Celie; specifically, a lack of power, knowledge, agency, or voice. We may safely surmise that Celie does not verbally address Albert as “Mr.

Blank”; that long (and phallic) line, therefore, which underscores empty space, operates as a written signifier of all that which Celie is lacking, or the emptiness that has pervaded her life previous to meeting Shug. But “Mr.” is itself symbolic. Indeed, Celie has been calling Albert by this title for so long that she forgets his actual name when it is spoken by Shug: “Who Albert, I wonder. Then I remember Albert Mr. ______first name”

(Walker 47). Not only does such a cold and impersonal appellative strip Albert of any vulnerability, but it also augments the hierarchical structure of their marriage, which is more of a master/slave connection than a symbiotic bond between two consenting and autonomous adults. Moreover, “Mr.” can be seen as Celie’s own personal signifier for males in general, and – because “Mr.” is a term that is reserved for people to whom we owe respect or for whom we hold reverence – their status as a hegemonic sex. It is only long after Celie returns from Memphis, her bildung actualized, that she calls Albert by his name on a regular basis. Aiding Celie in this renewed familiarity is Albert’s decision to prove that even such as man as he is neither entirely wanting in humanity nor impervious to self improvement: “Just when Mr. ______done ast me to marry him again, this time in the spirit as well as in the flesh” (Walker 283). Poignantly, even though Celie rejects Albert’s second offer of marriage, the sentiment is enough to, from that point on, call him “Albert,” which, if nothing else, can be construed as a signifier for

“friendship.”

Structurally, the largest signifier that Celie has, in fact, achieved bildung, or a transcendence of Christianity, can be found in the subject to whom she writes her letters.

Roughly two-thirds through The Color Purple, Celie decides to write to Nettie rather than to God. This sudden change of addressees is a structural indicator of Shug’s influence on

Celie’s spirituality. It is no accident, for example, that one of Celie’s first missives to be directed to Nettie also happens to be one in which Celie and Shug’s explicit discussion about God is transcribed. Celie’s decision to change the intended recipient of her letters is structurally symptomatic of her ideological persuasion by Shug during this pivotal, if

82 climactic, discussion. Nevertheless, while this is the first letter in which a primary cause of Celie’s deviating loyalty to Christianity is elucidated narratively, this is actually the second letter to be addressed to Nettie, proving that Celie’s increasing religious aberrance, or her willingness to seek a spiritual alternative to Christianity – which itself is fueled by a lingering resentment of God, acrimony brought upon by His absence, or negligence, during her worst sufferings – has been fomenting long before she has been made aware of Emersonianism by Shug: “Yeah, [Celie] say, and [God] give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again” (Walker 192). In sum, while Emersonianism has a massive role to play in Celie’s bildung, it is a role that precipitates, not creates, Celie’s deep-seeded desire for a spiritual substitute. Indeed, Celie’s decision to address her letters to Nettie can also be seen as a structural evolution of her earlier attempt to deconstruct God linguistically. When Celie learns that her family’s past was not what she believed it to be, she gives up any attempt to deconstruct God, linguistically or otherwise, and opts to renounce Him entirely, or as

Thyreen says, “When everything that Celie has ever believed, or always thought to be true, is pulled from her through the revelations in Nettie’s letters, she rejects God”

(Thyreen 60). Thus, it becomes Shug’s responsibility, as Celie’s spiritual mentor, to ameliorate Celie’s pessimism: “[Shug] talk and she talk, trying to budge me way from blasphemy. But I blaspheme much as I want to” (Walker 192). Though Shug’s

Emersonian philosophies are successful in getting Celie to accept a form of “god,” Celie persists in corresponding to Nettie, for Nettie, as a fellow black woman, not only bears a closer physical resemblance to her sister – and is therefore a far more personalized

83 construct – but also will never, unlike the Judeo-Christian God, and in spite of being half a world apart, be truly absent, for every word that Nettie writes is, for Celie, a reminder, or signified, of her everlasting love and commitment.

Ultimately, we may deduce that Walker herself is incredulous of not just

Christianity, but of all religions. She professes as much in her 1992 preface, claiming to have a preference for nature over any organized religion, which is surely a form of

Emersonianism: “Having recognized myself as a worshipper of Nature by the age of eleven, because my spirit resolutely wandered out the window to seek trees and wind during Sunday sermons, I saw no reason why, once free, I should bother with religious matters at all” (Walker). The Color Purple tells the tale of a woman whose quest to become cognizant of the very construct that has kept her psychologically imprisoned, thus freeing herself upon achieving such cognizance. This achievement could not have been made were it not for her discovery of sexual agency, a superior grasp of language, and an original impression – or signified – of the signifier “god.” Celie’s transcendence

(which is far more reminiscent of Wilson’s real-life transcendence than it is of Frado’s) is what makes The Color Purple prime exemplum of not only an average bildungsroman, or novel of formation, but also a novel of transformation.

Chapter 4: Janie’s Transcendent Religion in Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Zora’s pride in black people was so pronounced in the ersatz black twenties that it made other blacks suspicious and perhaps uncomfortable (after all, they were still infatuated with things European).”

– Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

It is perhaps due to our cultural conditioning that, when looking at the title of Zora

Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, we visualize automatically – just like

Frado and Celie – the Judeo-Christian God; that is to say, we, as members of Occidental civilization, have been preprogrammed to think of “god” as a white male. Unlike Frado, however – who has been so heavily inculcated by this racial and gender bias that she never sees beyond it – or even Celie – who, in spite of her early belief that “god” is male and white, is able to successfully replace select aspects of her Christianity with a more personalized, and therefore more emotionally supportive, form of spirituality we might call “Emersonianism” – Janie Crawford, the protagonist of Their Eyes Were Watching

God, is never infected by such religious conventionality. Janie is different from Celie in that she is an adherent of Emersonianism from the very beginning of her narrative. It may even surprise readers to know that no mention is made of any adherence to Christianity by Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God save for a brief reference to her reduced church attendance in chapter twelve: “‘De Pastor claim Tea Cake don’t ’low her tuh come tuh church only once in awhile ’cause he want dat change tuh buy gas wid. Just draggin’ de woman away from church’” (Hurston 111). Thus, the “god” to which the novel’s title refers is not the classical white male deity whose physical appearance has been tirelessly depicted by artists, but nature, a higher power that is, for Janie, somehow

85 more abstract, and yet – because it can be seen, heard, tasted, and smelled – more palpable.

It cannot be argued that Their Eyes Were Watching God is still a bildungsroman; howbeit, Janie’s bildung – that is, her spiritual formation – has a slight twist when compared to those of her literary peers in that her spirituality – in this case, her

Emersonianism – does not need developing so much as a voice by which to express it, for

Janie is still a black woman, and, like Frado and Celie, endures dual layers of oppression and suffers accordingly. One half of this oppressive duality – patriarchy – is responsible for actively attempting to rob Janie of any ability to possess a voice. In this chapter, I claim that Janie’s development of her voice can be delineated by Hurston’s use of metaphorical imagery, including the pear tree (which connotes Janie’s budding sexuality as well as her idealized impression of relationships), Matt Bonner’s yellow mule (which is suggestive of black women’s low ranking on society’s hierarchy in addition to slavery as a whole), and a hurricane (Hurston’s brilliant revisionist view of the Old Testament tale of the Flood), which can be perceived as a symbolic annihilator of all objects or structures that were built by men (such as a dike), and which, therefore, are intended to represent a constraint upon or even a danger to black women’s spiritual and vocal freedoms.

If Hurston was willing to allow herself, or even her literary protagonists, greater latitude in her personal construal of “god” than her precursor, Harriet Wilson, it may be because America as a whole had developed a comparatively secularized atmosphere by the initial quarter of the twentieth century. This secularized atmosphere enabled women

86 like Hurston to develop innovative and personalized views of what what, precisely, constitutes “god.” Of course, by “secular,” I merely infer that the purpose of churches, particularly in black communities, became increasingly manifold during Hurston’s lifetime; that is, they graduated from sanctuaries in which spiritual solace was sought exclusively to places in which political and other civil-related affairs were hosted. Much of this enhanced secularization of black churches stemmed from exigency: with the

Compromise of 1877, Union troops, who policed the South since the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865, withdrew, an event that led to a dramatic rise in white supremacy over the following decades. According to Albert Raboteau, numerous progressive black leaders and social reformers, who wanted to combat this new force of oppression, felt that,

“Many black ministers … were reluctant to attack discrimination and preached more about heaven and hell than about the problems troubling their people on earth. Too many black ministers were poorly educated and ill-prepared to deal with modern change”

(Raboteau 104). Some African Americans abandoned churches entirely in order to join secular organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People (NAACP) or the Urban League, although Raboteau is quick to note that, “Black churches were more political and black protest more religious than the critics admitted”

(Raboteau 105).

Irrespective of Christianity’s exact role in black America’s struggle against racial oppression, it is clear that many African Americans were increasingly willing to adopt a broader, more abstract, and more unique approach to “god.” Evidence for this is found not only historically – that is, in black America’s growing secularization – but also in

Janie’s Emersonian mindset in Their Eyes Were Watching God. If Janie subscribes to

Emersonianism – which, as we discussed in the previous chapter, is but a reinventing of

Protestantism – it may be because her creator inquired about Christianity’s precise meaning in a corresponding vein. According to literary scholar Erik Curren, “Hurston describes her childhood questioning of Christian tenets that seemed absurd to her …

Though she may have rejected the beliefs of Christianity, Hurston was not closed to the possibilities of the spiritual or supernatural realm” (Curren 21-22). If one needs proof that, in fact, Janie is an inherently Emersonian individual, he or she need only to look at an early scene in which Janie rests under a pear tree:

It was [spring]… She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree

soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees … She saw a dust-bearing bee

sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet

the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest

branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a

marriage! (Hurston 10-11)

As this passage demonstrates, Janie is not only Emersonian, but also a woman who brings

Emersonianism to new, provocative heights by expressing an unrestrained bliss that is so potent that it ascends to a level of titillating sexuality. Indeed, the pear tree hosts the interaction between the male bee and the female flower with an almost orgasmic glee.

Note how the male bee shows neither aggressivity nor rapacity; instead, he gently “sinks” into the calyx, which is feminized, and which, paradoxically, is not passive, but “arches to meet the love embrace.” By ejaculating to herself, “so this was a marriage!” Hurston

88 reveals Janie’s highly romanticized conception of marriage and men; for, Janie assumes that, just as her beloved pear tree’s fecundity is dependent on a type of sexual reciprocity, or sexual egalitarianism – that is, there are no prescribed gender roles, simply lifeforms that are programmed to embrace mutually and coöperatively – that the same must be with human beings. (On a more subconscious level, Hurston insinuates that Janie, as an

Emersonian, already has a spouse in Mother Nature, and to be subservient to a man – any man, even one as amiable as Tea Cake – is to commit a sort of spiritual adultery.) As

Their Eyes Were Watching God progresses, Janie learns, as part of her bildung, that that human-made construct known as ideology complicates dramatically the relations between men and women, which can never be as simple as the rapport between the calyx and her visiting bee precisely because such organisms are devoid of ideology. Thus, the pear tree symbolizes Janie’s naïveté as much as it serves as a blooming emblem of primaveral sexuality.

It is because Janie is naïve that she endeavors to reenact, so to speak, the transaction between the calyx and the bee by allowing Johnny Taylor to kiss her under the pear tree. Nanny, a woman whose soul has long been inured by a lifetime of hardship, witnesses what she deems as an impropriety and resolves that, because Janie’s sexuality is burgeoning, she must be given away to a man. This is one of the largest moments – if not the largest moment – of bildung for Janie, or as Hurston’s narrator says, “[Nanny’s decision] was the end of [Janie’s] childhood” (Hurston 12). It is at this point that any seductive images of Janie’s pear tree vanish in lieu of mule imagery. Initially, “mule” is used as an analogy by Nanny to juxtapose black women to their racial and sexual

89 antipode – the white man: “‘De white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. … De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see’” (Hurston

14). This analogy is sadly apt, for Nanny, as a woman who was born into slavery and was raped by her overseer, knows all too well of the dual layers of oppression to which black women are subjected. Though institutionalized slavery is over by the time Janie reaches adolescence, Nanny is keenly aware that women, and particularly black women, remain slaves of patriarchy, and slaves, like mules, are procured and owned strictly for utilitarian purposes, employed as beasts of burden. Similar to mules, black women like Nanny have endured daily drudgery for years, even decades, work that is forced upon them by their male “owners.” For a black woman like Nanny, the abolition of slavery meant far less than it did for her male counterparts, as it merely changed the skin color of her overseer from white to black.

Janie is “sold” to her first “overseer,” Logan Killicks, a minister whom Nanny insists is a “good man” (13). It is here that the mule motif graduates from analogy to ominous reality for Janie, as, subsequent to a brief honeymooning period of uxoriousness,

Logan begins to expect Janie, who already does his cooking and cleaning, to exert herself like a literal mule: “‘If Ah kin haul de wood heah and chop it fuh yuh, look lak you oughta be able tuh tote it inside’” (Hurston 26). But Janie is no Celie, and is quick to defend her integrity: “‘If you can stand not to chop and tote wood Ah reckon you can stand not to git no dinner’” (26). It is important to note that, during this heated exchange,

Logan -- unlike Janie’s next husband, Joe Starks -- does not attempt to silence Janie, but chooses to buy an actual mule as an indirect response to her refusal to toil: “[Janie asked]

‘Whut you need two mules fuh? Lessen you aims to swap off dis one.’ ‘Naw, Ah needs two mules dis yeah.’ … Logan held his wad of tobacco real still in his jaw like a thermometer of his feelings while he studied Janie’s face and waited for her to say something” (Hurston 27). By waiting “for her to say something,” Hurston makes it evident that Logan hopes that Janie will capitulate at the last second, not only sparing him a trip to Lake City, but also, more vitally, that she will accede to his demands that she be, in effect, his second mule, thereby reaffirming his position as patriarch.

But mules are emblematic of much more than hard labor; for, as the interspecies offspring of donkeys and horses, mules may also come to signify genetic anomalies, are outsiders. Analogously, black women – even pale-skinned black women like Janie – can likewise be made to feel like pariahs when confronted with so much oppression. For example, Celie views herself as aberrant in the context of her physicality (because she is continuously ridiculed for being “ugly”) as well as situationally (because her rapist is her presumed “Pa”), and only when she completes the initial phase of her bildung – bodily acceptance – does she begin to believe otherwise. For Janie, however, an animal that is a product of two separate species is especially meaningful because it is representative of not only her own racially mixed parentage – no doubt, many Caucasians in Janie’s era would have perceived African Americans to members of a dissimilar species – but also

Janie’s lonely state of being looked upon as “alien” by the people amongst whom she decides to live. If Janie were to ever reside in a white community, she would be forever viewed as black, and therefore inferior; as part of a black community, Janie would be considered “different,” not just because she has paler skin, but because she struggles to

91 succeed in her prescribed gender role as an obsequious housewife. Mules, correlatively, are notorious for their lack of servility, displaying, in its place, recalcitrant and capricious behavior, the same demeanor that is exhibited by Janie from the start: “‘Scuse mah freezolity, Mist’ Killicks, but Ah don’t mean to chop de first chip’” (Hurston 26). This ostensive stubbornness – which can be more accurately interpreted as a progressive refusal to adhere to prescribed but superannuated gender roles – exacerbates Janie’s uniqueness, or even abnormality, during her marriage to Joe, which, consequently, leads to a general opinion that, as a housewife, Janie is performatively inferior. Hence, Janie cannot escape from a perceived inferiority, a sign that she, as a black woman, is placed squarely at the bottom of the social stratum, just as mules – an animal which is regarded as so lowly as to be almost comical and upon which no self-respecting king would dare mount, but is reserved for that king’s fool – have been, historically, the least valued of equines.

Janie and mules share one last commonality: lack of progeny. Due to their hybridity, mules are genetically unable to produce young; Janie, analogously, despite her sexual activity, is never impregnated during her narrative. This is not meant to imply that

Janie is sterile; indeed, neither the narrator nor Janie herself explicitly addresses the subject of Janie’s ability to bear children. Thus, it cannot be determined conclusively if

Janie is barren or if she merely desires to eschew responsibilities involving maternity. Be that as it may, the evidence is in favor of Janie’s sterility, for she, by the end of the novel, has been matrimonially bound to three men, one of who, Joe, displays immense conceit.

Thus, it is not implausible to imagine that Joe – that is, a man who enjoys a great degree

92 of power – would desire a child, especially a son, to whom he can transfer his legacy and even his cherished ideologies, for to do so would mean that his accomplishments, which themselves are vestiges of his having existed this world, would not fall victim to obscurity. To be sure, obscurity is the foremost enemy of conceit. It is for this reason that

Janie’s (possible) infertility is linked to her silencing; for, if Janie cannot reproduce, then no future generation can be available to carry on her voice; to wit, there can be no descendant to ensure that Janie’s Emersonian ideologies, or even memories of Janie herself, will not die alongside her. The possibility of postmortem anonymity was a very likely one for black women, whose faces were, in Janie’s era, rarely, if ever, found in history books, and whose names were barely uttered in classrooms. In short, if a black woman was childless, she risked being “silenced” for all eternity.

Hurston herself saw that, for black women, public voice was a privilege that was as crucial to utilize as it was precariously kept. In her wonderful text, In Search of Our

Mother’ Gardens, Alice Walker informs us that Hurston was a woman who had little compunction about making her own voice heard: “Zora was a woman who wrote and spoke her mind—as far as one could tell, practically always. People who knew her and were unaccustomed to this characteristic in a woman … attacked her as meanly as they could” (Walker 87). In creating Janie, Hurston is imaging what would be, for her, the worst of scenarios: a suppression of her voice. It is during Janie’s marriage to Joe – the longest of her conjugal ties – that she experiences the most blatant vocal suppression. It is no accident, therefore, that during this particular marriage, Hurston introduces Matt

Bonner’s yellow mule, an animal that mirrors Janie’s status as a beleaguered commodity.

The yellow mule also resembles Janie in that it is a presence about which groups of men love to gossip and joke: “Take … Matt Bonner’s yellow mule. They had him up for conversation every day the Lord sent” (Hurston 51). This quote hints at the vocal freedom that men enjoy (in comparison to their female complements) and usually take for granted; as men, they are permitted to talk about any matter of their choosing, be it in jest or in earnest. But as the narrator informs us, Janie is not a recipient of the same privilege:

“Janie loved the conversation and sometimes she thought up good stories on the mule, but Joe had forbidden her to indulge” (Hurston 53). Unlike Logan, Joe directly silences

Janie; for, so far as Joe is concerned, Janie’s raison d'être is to function as a mute object of beauty whose allure should serve as a visual testament to his prominence and prosperity.

Like many bildungsroman heroines, Janie must “grow down” before she can “grow up.” Subsequent to being wedded to Joe for an indeterminate amount of time,

Janie begins to internalize Joe’s belief that an admirable wife is one who is, above all else, silent. This internalization is evinced when Janie, upon observing a number of people participating in “mule-baiting,” reacts by vocalizing her disgust to herself only:

“She snatched her head away from the spectacle and began muttering to herself. ‘They oughta be shamed uh theyselves! Teasin’ dat poor brute beast lak they is’” (Hurston 56, emphasis my own). This passage is an example of Hurston’s expert interweaving of metaphor and characterization. Just as Matt Bonner’s yellow mule is tormented physically, Janie is tormented in a manner that may be less overt – that is, psychologically and ideologically – but is still no less damaging as well as dehumanizing

94 to her overall character (which makes her even more akin to a mule), proving that an attack on one’s mind can be just as harmful as an attack on one’s body. As a result, Janie vicariously feels the pain of Matt Bonner’s yellow mule because it is an avatar of Janie herself.

Janie’s newly internalized silence manifests itself in other instances, such as when

Joe, who overhears Janie’s verbal disapproval of his mule-baiting, sits next to her, but, as opposed to broaching the issue, circumvents it by commanding her to retrieve his shoes:

“She got up without a word and went off” (Hurston 57, emphasis my own). Janie then attempts to justify her self-imposed silence by thinking, “She wanted to fight about it.

‘But Ah hates disagreement and confusion, so Ah better not talk. It makes it hard tuh git along’” (Hurston 57). This line, arguably more than any other in Their Eyes Were

Watching God, demonstrates that, for as long as Janie’s last name remains “Starks,” her bildung will have a downward trajectory; she will regress spiritually, or “grow down” from a free-spirited Emersonian to a patriarchal woman, which Lois Tyson labels as, “A woman who has internalized the norms and values of patriarchy, which can be defined, in short, as any culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles” (Tyson

81).

Fortunately, Janie soon proves that any such ideological regression is not totally irreversible. She does this when she takes a chance at verbalizing her approval of Joe’s purchase of Matter Bonner’s yellow mule, purely so that it is no longer forced to work, comparing his equine acquirement to the freeing of slaves (and, in so doing, augmenting the parallel between mules and African Americans, and particularly black women):

“‘[You] like … Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, he had de whole United States tuh rule so he freed de Negroes. You got uh town so you freed uh mule’” (Hurston 58). Because Janie is so regularly silenced by her domineering husband, no one could have realized just how eloquent such a woman as Janie can be, if only she can be given an opportunity to exercise her public voice: “‘Yo wife is uh born orator, Starks. Us never knowed dat befo’.

She put jus’ de right words tuh our thoughts’” (Hurston 58).

Regardless of such encouragement, Joe continues to strive to silence Janie. When

Matt Bonner’s yellow mule dies, Eatonville opts to have a burial ceremony, which they call a “draggin’ out.” In spite of her obvious compassion for the mule, Janie is commanded to stay at home. As for Joe himself, he promises Janie that his presence is required because, “[The townsfolk] need me tuh say uh few words over de carcass, dis bein’ uh special case’” (Hurston 60). Joe has discovered a new adversary in Janie’s eloquence – a quality of which he is more afraid than proud – precisely because it so clearly inspired awe amongst his residents, and such esteem for Janie, Joe fears, could diminish his power as a leader, and even, perhaps more egregiously, emasculate him.

Since Joe would never dare to risk his persona to be vitiated in such a manner, he forbids

Janie from joining the procession while allowing himself to “say uh few words.” It is here that Joe is, once again, effectively silencing Janie, albeit not literally, as he normally does, but by means of spatial separation. However, a clue that Joe sees Janie’s voice as a threat to his masculine dominance can be found before her Abe Lincoln simile, when a crowd asks for her to deliver a speech of “encouragement” (43) on behalf of Joe, who has just been elected mayor, a request to which Joe responds, “‘Thank yuh fuh yo’

96 compliments, but mah wife don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s a uh woman and her place is in de home’” (Hurston

43). Not only does Janie ultimately prove this sexist assumption wrong, but this quote also displays the heteronormative standards to which countless women like Janie were held.

Joe very likely anticipates that leaving her alone during the mule’s burial will generate sentiments of bitterness in Celie. What Joe does not anticipate, however, is that, by excluding Janie from the funeral of the very creature to which she felt ineffably connected, he has inadvertently reversed the downward trajectory of her spiritual bildung:

“The town escorted the carcass off. No, the carcass moved off with the town, and left

Janie standing in the doorway” (Hurston 60). In her superb essay, “From Mules to

Muliebrity: Speech and Silence in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Julie Haurykiewicz contests that the doorway in which Janie is described to be standing is representative of an ideological threshold – that is, a boundary beyond which spiritual improvement and independence are achievable realities: “Janie’s position on the threshold [the doorway] is symbolic of her readiness to cross over into a way of life where she refuses to be silenced by her husband” (Haurykiewicz 57). The idea that this doorway is a symbol seems impossible to deny, as its presence coincides with the death of Matt Bonner’s yellow mule, an animal which, as we have discussed, acts a primary symbol of Janie’s silence as well as her status as commodity. Thus, when Matt Bonner’s yellow mule dies, so too does Janie’s need to keep silent, or, as Haurykiewicz puts it, “The death of the mules signifies on the death of woman-as-mule” (Haurykiewicz 57). The doorway, in

97 expanding upon Haurykiewicz’s idea of its symbolism, operates as a metaphor for Janie’s transition from woman-as-mule to woman. Furthermore, once Matter Bonner’s yellow mule is gone, all mule imagery, in any context, vanishes from Their Eyes Are Watching

God.

With mules removed from her narrative, Janie’s bildung trajectory has been reversed. We see Janie recover much fortitude and fractiousness, attributes with which she was born, but have been weakened due to her oppressive marriage to Joe. For example, hearing a group of men (among whom is her own husband) mock a neighbor simply because he declines to hit his wife proves to be too much for Janie’s dignity:

“Janie did what she had never done before, that is, thrust herself into the conversation”

(Hurston 75). This moment is a direct contrast to an earlier scene in which Joe “[forbids

Janie] to indulge” (Hurston 53). Consequently, a chagrined Joe retorts by condemning

Janie’s audacious use of public voice: “‘You getting’ too moufy’” (Hurston 75).

However, such moments do not, for Janie, become a norm. Joe’s insistent dominance over Janie prevents her bildung – in this case, her return to her Emersonianism – to be as precipitous as she would like it to be; Janie must negotiate between the spiritual mandates of her Emersonian self and the mandates of that archetype of patriarchy that is her husband: “No matter what Jody did, [Janie] said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some” (Hurston 76, emphasis my own). To phrase it in alternative way,

Joe is denying Janie’s spirituality an opportunity to take full flight; Janie is like a captive bird, yearning to soar toward a “horizon,” and Joe can be likened to a clip in her wing, keeping her grounded.

Unfortunately, upon realizing that his wife is becoming too “moufy,” Joe decides to escalate his methods by which to dominate Janie: “She wasn’t petal-open anymore with him. … She found that out one day when he slapped her face in the kitchen”

(Hurston 71). Note that this passage, with its allusion to an opening blossom, uses language that is not only Emersonian, but is also reminiscent of the pear tree, which itself was indicative of a much younger Janie’s quixotic impression of marriage. Truly, Joe has proven that he is no bee, for he practices neither gentleness nor even respect for Janie, who, unlike the calyx into which the bee sinks, does not, “arch to meet his embrace,” but instead closes herself off to him, refusing to be “petal-open.”

Indeed, it takes not only the demise of Joe, but also the introduction of Tea Cake for Janie to be “petal-open” again. Of Janie’s three husbands, Janie loves Tea Cake most passionately. This love – and the intensity thereof – helps to bring about her heretofore- repressed Emersonianism: “Her soul crawled out from its hiding place” (Hurston 128).

Literary scholar Karla Holloway attests that, because Tea Cake does not treat Janie like a commodity (not initially, anyway) he, despite his faults, is the recipient of her undiluted love, and this sentiment, a key ingredient necessary for any genuine Emersonian – and one for which she, having been trapped in two loveless marriages, has been so ravenously hungry -- allows her to finally fly toward that horizon, a reoccurring symbol for limitless potentiality: “Loving Tea Cake, the man who encourages [Janie] to look into her soul, enables her spiritual liberation. He made her feel a ‘self-crushing love’ that released her spirit” (Holloway 129).

But Tea Cake is far from perfect. First, Tea Cake is guilty of pilfering Janie’s money, which he uses to purchase an elaborate dinner for his friends (a repast to which

Janie is not invited, no less). Second, and even worse, however, is that Tea Cake is eventually consigned, in his wife’s eyes, to the same petty and ignominious status as his predecessor, Joe -- that is, an abusive oppressor -- once he resolves to strike Janie, who has been subjected to several recent sexual advances, purely because he has been plagued by jealousy: “Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. … He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss”

(Hurston 146). Surely, a man beating a woman so as to give her visible bruises, thereby guaranteeing “ownership” of her, is analogous to a male dog urinating on a plot of land so any canine that follows him will know instinctively not to step on it.

Needless to say, women are not plots of land, and Janie, at this late stage in her life, is weary of being treated as such. Therefore, it is no coincidence that, immediately subsequent to Tea Cake’s beating of Janie, there is, in lieu of more mule imagery, a hurricane, a phenomenon of nature that is infamous for its unrivaled destructiveness

(hurricanes are also events which, interestingly, are given female names by contemporary meteorologists). Most critics of Their Eyes Were Watching God concur the hurricane is symbolic of Janie’s anger, which itself is brought upon by her discouragement, at comprehending that even a man like Tea Cake – a man who acted as a sort of spiritual emancipator -- could be capable of sentencing her to exist – or, perhaps it could be more apt to say subsist -- under his own regime of impenitent patriarchy. Thus, as a symbol,

100 the hurricane is the opposite of the pear tree; whereas the former was an emblem of

Janie’s naïveté when it comes to marriage and men, the latter represents a transformative moment in which Janie grasps, even subliminally, that, in order to be Emersonian, a man cannot be present in her life; for Janie, men and nature are mutually exclusive. Such a reading, while valid, is also a bit facile; for, in addition to signifying Janie’s fury, I must also argue that the hurricane is an allusion to the biblical Flood. According to Genesis, the Judeo-Christian God, in His unhappiness with man, created a deluge so as to wash man away, permitting humanity to begin anew thereafter. In Their Eyes Were Watching

God, the hurricane is a metonymy for Janie’s own raging psyche, of course, but it is also of suggestive of Janie’s wish to, like God, cleanse the earth of man, and, in so doing, purging it of all dangers to black women. What’s more, the hurricane operates as a liberator of all aspects of nature that are controlled by man, just as Janie herself was for so long victimized by control. Consider the way in which the narrator details the failure of a dike to contain a lake: “The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors” (Hurston 162). Observe how the lake’s release is described not entirely as a menacing occurrence, but like a newly unfettered prisoner whose “loosed chains” give him a chance to escape over a prison wall, for which the dike – a construct that is designed to control, and which was doubtlessly built by men – is a metaphor. Hurston makes this metaphor even more explicit when she adds that the lake rushes toward its

“supposed-to-be conquerors,” preparing to inundate them with impunity, reminding us

101 that nature – be it in the form of a lake or the human spirit – is intrinsically uncontrollable.

Discerning readers will notice that Hurston associates the lake with the pronoun

“he.” This choice of gender may seem incongruous to her feminist metaphor – that is, the lake as a female who is held captive by a wall of which men are the architects – until we realize that the hurricane itself is female: “Havoc was there with her mouth wide open”

(Hurston 167, emphasis my own). Thus, if the hurricane is female, and the lake is male, then the latter is being subjugated by the whims of the former, generating a metaphorical gender role reversal, which happens to be the a reality for which Janie yearns. Susan

Meisenhelder, in her excellent essay, “False Gods and Black Goddesses in Naylor’s

Mama Day and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, not only corroborates this idea of the hurricane as an angry female entity, but also says that, “Hurston repeats [the hurricane’s] gender identification and a reminder of the storm’s power to destroy white men’s creations” (Meisenhelder 1444).

Their Eyes Were Watching Gods concludes where it began: with a recently widowed Janie telling her friend, Pheoby, her life’s story, prompting us to her remember that the majority of her narrative is told in flashback. The fact that Janie uses her own voice as a medium by which to communicate the development of that same voice adds not only an element of dramatic impact, but also demonstrates that she has, by the closing paragraph, achieved bildung. Janie has always been, and will always be, an Emersonian spirit, but she cannot be fully be so if she cannot have use of her voice, which itself may be interpreted as a tool from God so His designs may be extolled. The trajectory of

102

Janie’s bildung may not have been consistently upward – such is the case with many female bildungsromane – but, the Janie seen at the end of the novel – sobered, single and yet content – is a far cry from the younger, more impressionable Janie, situated under a pear tree, whose impressions of connubiality were unabashedly quixotic. It is not known if Janie will be married again, but there is one truth of which we are certain: Tea Cake may be dead, but for as long as she has nature, Janie will never truly be alone: “Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. … So much of life in its meshes!

She called in her soul to come and see” (Hurston 193).

103

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