UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Through the Second Looking Glass: Inventing the Minority Bildungsroman Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/020614nk Author Henry, Alvin Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Through the Second Looking Glass: Inventing the Minority Bildungsroman By Alvin James Henry A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary – Literature and Social Thought in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Abdul JanMohamed, Chair Professor Paola Bacchetta Professor Kent Puckett Professor Carol Stack Professor Bryan Wagner Fall 2012 © Copyright 2012 Alvin James Henry All Rights Reserved Abstract Through the Second Looking Glass: Inventing the Minority Bildungsroman by Alvin Henry Doctor of Philosophy in Literature and Social Thought University of California, Berkeley Professor Abdul JanMohamed, Chair My dissertation argues for the importance of what I term the minority Bildungsroman, a genre that twentieth-century writers adopted in order to represent racial anxiety as well as to imagine a way for the minority subject to move beyond it. By looking at the minority Bildungsroman as a literary form that exposes the process of Bildung not as self-formation but as self-dissolution, I aim to offer an important new perspective into how minority literature uses genre and literary history: only close attention to plot, character, and narrative reveals how these texts create a new genre to depict the minority subject’s escape from the complex of socially- imposed identities originating from the dead mother complex. Unlike the subject of the traditional Bildungsroman, who achieves social integration and a stable ego, the minority subject in this new genre fails to successfully internalize the social roles that he is assigned. The instability and suffering imposed by double consciousness and racial anxiety cause him to throw off his prescribed identities. The narrator of Invisible Man, for instance, pursues experiences aimed at achieving social integration. Yet these paths result only in failure. He excels at college and glimpses a future of affluence and prominence, for instance, but only to be summarily expelled. Such experiences fail to produce what they promise, eventually thwarting his desire for normality and success. Seeking to be more than the poor, rural blacks that haunt his memory, yet unable to assimilate, Invisible Man progressively casts off elements of his social identity, and, in the novel’s climax, reaches a state of social formlessness, or invisibility. The structures of white society, Ellison implies, cannot but deform those minorities who attempt to live in accordance with them. This movement towards self-disintegration, however, opens the space for the radical conclusion of the minority Bildungsroman. As a subject without subjectivities he begins what I call a “second mirror stage.” By combining Lacan’s notion of subject formation with Du Bois’s conception of the end of double consciousness as a “longing to attain self- conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” I argue that the second mirror stage allows the subject to reconstitute his ego and identity. This process terminates racial anxiety and the double consciousness that engenders it. Reworking the form of the traditional Bildungsroman, these authors use formal innovation as the means of reimagining the self and, I argue, show that literary analysis is capable of recovering otherwise hard-to-access originary psychic traumas. 1 Chapter Summaries My dissertation compares African American and Asian American novels of self- deformation to track the evolution of the a new genre, the minority bildungsroman. In Chapter 1, “Nella Larsen’s Rogue Black Women: Anti-Black Aesthetics and the Formation of the Minority Bildungsroman,” I show that the inability of the traditional Bildungsroman to capture and imagine the minority subject pushed Larsen to turn towards a new genre. This chapter demonstrates the differences between the operation of character, plot, and narrative closure in the traditional and minority Bildungsroman. I argue that Larsen first asks what it means to be a woman in Quicksand, a novel whose authoring leads her to the realization that developmental models of self-formation centered on the traditional processes of marriage and childbirth have worked to imprison black women in the confines of prescribed subjectivities. In Passing, Larsen turns to the minority Bildungsroman to convey an alternative vision of African American women’s self-formation. Instead of developing her subjects into a restrictive, traditional “fullness,” Larsen imbues them with taboo desires that help disintegrate their identities. Motherhood and heterosexuality, for example, are replaced with disinterested and negligent mothers and lesbian love. Although one of the protagonists of Passing approaches a full disintegration, she stops short and returns to a typical life—one that will end just like Helga’s in Quicksand. Clare, the other protagonist, succeeds in completing a second mirror stage, though she dies right after its conclusion. Larsen complicates the stakes of the second mirror stage by indicating that physical death might be a risk in the pursuit of minority Bildung. My second chapter, “Toward a Second Mirror Stage: A General Theory of Disability in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” considers how Ralph Ellison negotiates the fraught relationship between disability, race, and homosexuality. During the period of Jim Crow, race and male homosexuality in its many forms were considered disabilities. Rather than critique this construct, Ellison adopts its logic to construct a general theory of disability, representing race and homosexuality as just two species of it. By subtly embracing this conflation, Ellison gains the freedom to work through sensitive racial problems by negotiating them through the framework of disability. Encoding Invisible Man’s process of disintegration in disability, the narrative does not ostensibly read as a minority Bildungsroman since disability already entails a disintegrating and mangled body. For Ellison, Invisible Man must come to accept rather than resist his disabilities—his race and his homosexuality—in order to properly disintegrate his social identities. Once he successfully disintegrates, he will be able to complete his second mirror stage, terminate his hibernation, and re-enter the world. In my third chapter, “Blaming the Dead Mother: Finding the Mother in John Okada’s No- No Boy,” I address how the first mirror stage is hijacked by anti-minority racism and how its outcome of a fictive subjectivity reverberates throughout the novel. The first mirror stage incorporates anti-minority racism and repositions the mother function. Okada gives us the opportunity to closely examine why the subjectivity created in the first mirror stage must be disintegrated. Okada illustrates the way in which the forced migration and imprisonment of Japanese Americans into rural encampments during the Second World War stripped Japanese parents of their authority in both the public and private spheres. Okada fictionalizes this debilitation of parents in the socially and psychically “dead” maternal and paternal characters of his novel in order to imagine the consequences of, and a possible escape from, anti-Japanese racism. Okada demonstrates how these dead parents, particularly the dead mother, factor into the formation of youth in the context of the Japanese Internment and Cold War America more 2 generally. Ichiro, the protagonist son, spends the novel trying to extricate himself from the supposed source of his troubles—the dead mother, whom he blames for his inability to assimilate via enlisting in the military during internment, and for his inability to embody a Japanese, American, or Japanese American identity. Ichiro’s obsession with this assignation of guilt results in the disintegration of all of his social identities, including his relationship to his mother. Although Okada continues the narrative a few paragraphs after enacting narrative closure with the second mirror stage, he refuses to describe and thus author Ichiro’s new identity. By resisting the movement toward describing Ichiro’s new social identity, Okada allows the Japanese American subject to unfold without social or authorial influence. Ichiro finally possesses the ability to define himself. My final chapter, “How Bigger Wasn’t Born: Richard Wright’s Aesthetic of Black Bildung, 1940-1958,” explores Wright evolving idea of black bildung in Native Son and The Long Dream. I read Native Son as a critique of the social and psychic forces—from anti-black whites and African Americans—policing Bigger into various forms of self-education models. I demonstrate that violence serves not to extricate Bigger from these imposed identities but as a mode to access and develop self-consciousness. Bigger does not achieve “consciousness” nor does Wright flush out a comprehensive theory of black subjectivity. The Long Dream, written almost two decades later, crafts a theory of black masculinity in the context of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. I argue that Wright writes the tenets of the minority bildungsroman into the surface of the narrative. He guides the reader through the multiple introjections