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Masterarbeit / Master's Thesis MASTERARBEIT / MASTER’S THESIS Titel der Masterarbeit / Title of the Master‘s Thesis „Notions of Manhood and the Role of Women Characters in Three Books by 20th Century African American Writers from the American South“ verfasst von / submitted by Nicole Rauchlechner BA Bakk.phil. angestrebter akademischer Grad / in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (MA) Wien, 2019 / Vienna 2019 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt / UA 066 844 degree programme code as it appears on the student record sheet: Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt / Masterstudium Anglophone Literatures and Cultures degree programme as it appears on the student record sheet: Betreut von / Supervisor: emer. o. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz Acknowledgements This thesis was written over a period of almost five years with a long break in between. Therefore, I would like to express my particular thanks and gratitude to my supervisor, emer. o. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, who has accompanied me through all these years with incredible patience, understanding and encouragement, and has offered me much needed guidance and advice on how to finally bring this project to a successful end. I would also like to thank my family and friends for their continuous support and for always being there for me no matter what. Thank you to Christoph for being a paragon of patience and for putting up with my crazi/laziness and thank you to my MA-family for letting me fully focus on the completion of my studies this year. I am grateful for your support and humbled by your unwavering belief in me. Abbreviations GOM: A Gathering of Old Men MOT: The Marrow of Tradition OALD: Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary TKM: The Known World Table of contents 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 9 2 Jones, Chesnutt, Gaines: from slavery to the post-Civil Rights Movement ... 12 2.1 Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003) .............................................. 12 2.2 Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) .............................. 18 2.3 Ernest J. Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men (1983) ..................................... 25 3 Notions of manhood and configurations of masculinity .................................. 32 3.1 Knowing how to be a man in The Known World .......................................... 32 3.1.1 Power-hungry men and their punishments ........................................... 33 3.1.2 Good intentioned individuals who ultimately fail ................................... 39 3.1.3 Loving human beings transcending boundaries ................................... 46 3.2 Traditions of manhood in The Marrow of Tradition ...................................... 49 3.2.1 White male hysteria and the decay of Southern aristocracy ................. 50 3.2.2 The advancement of new middle-class gentlemen ............................... 54 3.2.3 Southern black manhood ...................................................................... 58 3.3 The men that gathered in A Gathering of Old Men ...................................... 62 3.3.1 (Re-)Claiming black masculinity ........................................................... 63 3.3.2 Violence and family honor in the Cajun community .............................. 69 3.3.3 The white perspective ........................................................................... 73 4 The role of women characters and the power of change ................................. 80 4.1 Derailing expectations in The Known World ................................................ 80 4.1.1 White-identifying, patronizing mistresses.............................................. 81 4.1.2 Independent wives capable of change ................................................. 83 4.1.3 Marginalized and suppressed but ultimately free .................................. 87 4.2 Occupying untraditional spaces in The Marrow of Tradition ........................ 91 4.2.1 A woman of strong individuality with the spirit of independence ........... 92 4.2.2 Old Southern domesticity ...................................................................... 94 4.2.3 The untragic mulatto ............................................................................. 98 4.3 Girls with ‘spunk’ in A Gathering of Old Men ............................................. 101 4.3.1 White maternalism and the burden of an unwanted legacy ................ 101 4.3.2 Female voices of fear in times of crisis ............................................... 107 4.3.3 Black female rebellion......................................................................... 110 5 Conclusion.......................................................................................................... 115 6 References .......................................................................................................... 122 6.1 Primary texts ............................................................................................. 122 6.2 Secondary literature .................................................................................. 122 6.3 Online sources .......................................................................................... 125 7 Appendix ............................................................................................................. 127 7.1 English Abstract ........................................................................................ 127 7.2 German Abstract ....................................................................................... 127 9 1 Introduction While attending Prof. Zacharasiewicz’s seminar on recent fiction from the American South, I was introduced to Ernest J. Gaines and his works and have been fascinated by his writings ever since. Especially the way in which he approaches issues of manhood and dignity in the Southern societies depicted in A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman sparked my interest and led me to question how black and white men are represented in Southern works of fiction of different time periods. Using Gaines’s representation of characters and the hardships and challenges they must overcome in order to find their own identities as a starting point, I soon delved into the worlds of Richard Wright’s Native Son, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, among others. With its unusual plot revolving around a black slave owner, the more recent and lesser known novel The Known World by Edward P. Jones struck me as particularly interesting, and I started to wonder how its male characters would perceive and claim notions of manhood in a society that values the ownership of human property above everything else. While its main focus lies on the time of slavery, the novel’s complex narrative also stretches beyond the Civil War and well into the 20th century. Since I wanted to examine different periods of Southern US history, the post- Reconstruction society of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition provided me with the opportunity to explore Southern concepts of masculinity at the beginning of the 20th century. The characters’ quest for manhood within the limitations of their deeply segregated community offers valuable insights into the workings of the male mind in a society that is governed by racial and economic fears. While The Known World is set on Virginia’s slave plantations of the mid-nineteenth century, The Marrow of Tradition explores an urban community in North Carolina at the turn of the 20th century. Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, then, completes the circle as it moves back onto the plantation again. Although the novel is set in the late 1970s, well after the Civil Rights Movement, life in Gaines’s fictional Louisianan St. Raphael Parish seems largely unchanged. Racial conflicts still govern the novel’s society, and the male characters’ notions of manhood are heavily affected by their burdensome pasts. 10 I will therefore use Jones’s The Known World, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men in this thesis to attempt to draw a picture of Southern society from the time of slavery over the post-Reconstruction period to the post-civil rights era. By closely examining these three novels, I want to explore the different approaches to black and white manhood as displayed in the respective communities and show how they are influenced and changed by the progress of time. Furthermore, since no society can consist of men alone, I want to analyze how women characters are represented in the novels, and what role they play in their respective worlds. I am particularly interested in how they contribute to the formation and upholding of their communities and want to show how they influence or inhibit the development of the male characters. I will start by taking into account the authors’ own lives as well as the epochs of US history of which their stories can be viewed as symptomatic of. Chapter 2 will therefore offer an introduction and overview of the three authors and their works and will particularly focus on narrative cornerstones such as time, setting, structure and narrative technique. In my opinion, it is also necessary to take into consideration the myriad of thematic concerns raised by each novel, which often reflect urgent issues of greater social relevance to the society depicted in each book. While their in-depth analysis would certainly go beyond the scope of this thesis,
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