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Toni Morrison and the Literary Canon: Whiteness, Blackness, and the Construction of Racial Identity

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Toni Morrison and the Literary Canon: Whiteness, Blackness, and the Construction of Racial Identity View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS) i TONI MORRISON AND THE LITERARY CANON: WHITENESS, BLACKNESS, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL IDENTITY THESIS submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTERS OF ARTS in English Literature at Rhodes University By ARETHA M M PHIRI December 2009 ii ABSTRACT Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, observes the pervasive silence that surrounds race in nineteenth-century canonical literature. Observing the ways in which the “Africanist” African-American presence pervades this literature, Morrison has called for an investigation of the ways in which whiteness operates in American canonical literature. This thesis takes up that challenge. In the first section, from Chapters One through Three, I explore how whiteness operates through the representation of the African- American figure in the works of three eminent nineteenth-century American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. The texts studied in this regard are: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Leaves of Grass, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This section is not concerned with whether these texts constitute racist literature but with the ways in which the study of race, particularly whiteness, reveals the contradictions and insecurities that attend (white American) identity. As such, Morrison’s own fiction, written in response to white historical representations of African-Americans also deserves attention. The second section of this thesis focuses on Morrison’s attempt to produce an authentically “black” literature. Here I look at two of Morrison’s least studied but arguably most contentious novels particularly because of what they reveal of Morrison’s complex position on race. In Chapter Four I focus on Tar Baby and argue that this novel reveals Morrison’s somewhat essentialist position on blackness and racial, cultural, and gendered identity, particularly as this pertains to responsibilities she places on the black woman as culture-bearer. In Chapter Five I argue that Paradise, while taking a particularly challenging position on blackness, reveals Morrison’s evolving position on race, particularly her concern with the destructive nature of internalized racism. This thesis concludes that while racial identities have very real material consequences, whiteness and blackness are ideological and social constructs which, because of their constructedness, are fallible and perpetually under revision. iii CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Contents…………………………………………………………………………………..iii Note on References and Abbreviations…………………………………………………..iv Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………......v Introduction………………………………………………………………………......1-24 Chapter One: Whitewashing Blackness: Gender, Sexuality, and Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin………………………………..............................25 Chapter Two: “I Celebrate Myself”: Whiteness and the Black Body in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass…………………………………………………………….58 Chapter Three: “Comrades and Yet Not Comrades”: Racial Friendship in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.......................................................................87 Chapter Four: Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby and the Culture-bearing Black Woman…………………………………………………………………………………121 Chapter Five: The Illusion of Isolation: Racial Purity and Oppression of the Self in Paradise………………………………………………………………………………...160 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..194 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...197 iv NOTE ON REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS I have followed the MLA guide to referencing in this thesis. See Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th Ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1999. The following abbreviations are used in this thesis: AHBF Adventures of Huckleberry Finn AS Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader BC Between Camps BSWM Black Skin, White Masks CC Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race DP Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness GT Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity IMFH In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture HG Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology LC Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars LG Leaves of Grass and Other Writings LT Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class PD Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination PS Paradise RSL Race, Slavery and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. TB Tar Baby TBA The Black Atlantic TSD The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom’s Cabin TWN To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of American Literature WWA Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography WRC We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity QCI Questions of Cultural Identity UTC Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The financial assistance of Rhodes University towards this research is hereby acknowledged. I would like to thank the Dean of Research as well as the Andrew Mellon Foundation for the continued support in this regard. In addition, I am indebted to the Grahamstown Training College Bursary Fund for the financial aid in my Honours year. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to these institutions. Words cannot express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Deborah Seddon, who relished this project with an enthusiasm that surpassed my expectations. Your academic and, above all, personal support and commitment, will be forever remembered and appreciated. You are special. I would like to thank all those in the English Department at Rhodes University who have made the Department feel like a home away from home for me. The Department has provided me with a friendly and intellectually stimulating environment in which to pursue my academic research. In particular I would like to thank Professor Mike Marais who kindly undertook proof reading and commenting on this thesis, Professor Dan Wylie for his generous interest in and care for my wellbeing throughout my time at Rhodes, and Professor Gareth Cornwell and Professor Paul Walters who have also been extremely supportive in my endeavours. Special and heartfelt thanks to my friends and family for their unwavering support. In particular, to my mother, Thelma Rowan, and my brother, Sean Phiri (and his family), without whose emotional and financial investment in me, this would not have been possible. 1 INTRODUCTION Race, Literature and the Making of a Nation Race theorist Ian F. Haney Lopez notes that race is ―neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing, plastic process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions‖ (165). Lopez‘s wide-ranging description is a useful one; particularly when seeking to understand the ambiguous but persistent role that race has historically assumed in American social and political life. Since the arrival of the first slaves from Africa to the state of Virginia in 1617, race has been an elusive but determining factor in terms of American national identity. The American notion of a manifest destiny was profoundly interlinked with racialized and often racist ideologies regarding the innate inferiority of indigenous populations but particularly of black people.1 In America: The New Imperialism, V.G. Kiernan notes that America was ―the vision of a new civilization that would be a model for all mankind,‖ but the irony was that American independence in 1776 ―also stimulated thinking about race and racial inequality as the needful justification for slavery, something hitherto taken for granted, with the result that America now became ‗a consciously racist society‘‖ (2, 24). Reginald Horsman observes that: Since the seventeenth century, Americans had proceeded in law and custom as though the blacks were essentially different. The presence of large numbers of 1 Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States gives an illuminating delineation of the nation from the perspective of those dispossessed, marginalized and subjugated in its establishment. This thesis‘s focus on Euro-American representation and treatment of African-Americans is not to trivialize the experiences of Native Americans and other racial groups, but to highlight that historically African- Americans in America are the index by which the inferiority of all ‗other‘ races is measured. In her interview with Bonnie Angelo in 1989, featured in Time Magazine and entitled, ―The Pain of Being Black,‖ Toni Morrison argues that ―black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war, to prevent other kinds of real conflagrations.‖ She elaborates: If there were no black people here in this country, it would have been Balkanized. The immigrants would have torn each other‘s throats out, as they have done everywhere else. But in becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me— it‘s nothing else but color. Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They could all say, ‗I am not that.‘ So in that sense, becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me. 2 blacks in the debased condition of slavery and the grassroots white antipathies toward these blacks clearly made many Americans extremely receptive to theories of inherent racial difference,
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