Didacticism in American Literature, 1890-1945

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Books Are Weapons: Didacticism in American Literature, 1890-1945

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Andrew John Smart

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2017

Dissertation Committee

Jared Gardner, Advisor

Thomas Davis

Elizabeth Hewitt

Jesse Schotter

Copyrighted by

Andrew John Smart

2017

Abstract

Drawing on New Historicism, Marxist criticism, and rhetorical theory, Books Are

Weapons argues for the significance of didacticism throughout the American literary tradition. Marxist critics have long discussed the possibilities that art offers for enacting social change, and rhetoricians have long studied the ways in which texts communicate persuasively. Books Are Weapons brings together these two parallel, but rarely intersecting, forms of inquiry. Books Are Weapons examines an archive of American literary production from the early twentieth century, primarily focusing on novels, but extending to include political pamphlets, autobiographies, poems, and sermons. This diverse set of cultural products allows this project to consider the multitude of ways that artists use their work for instructional purposes. These purposes are similarly diverse, including political persuasion, ethical instruction, and religious conversion. While these functions of literature are infrequently connected, it is my purpose in this project to demonstrate how they share a common didactic impulse, a quality found throughout

American literary history.

Examining the novels of Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright’s non-fiction work,

Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novels, the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, and the novels of

Zora Neale Hurston, this project examines the multitude of ways that literary texts can teach, inform, and persuade their readers. In this project, works that seek to persuade their

ii readers are not understood as manipulative, as is often the critique of didactic literature or protest literature. The focus of this project remains on the techniques and strategies of persuasion deployed by each author. When this project describes a work as didactic, it does so without the implication of simplicity or condescension that some have come to associate with the term. Instead, the goal of this work is to begin an excavation of the

American literary tradition that will uncover artifacts of instructional intent throughout literary history, allowing us to better understand the social role of literature.

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Dedication

For Casey.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at The Ohio State University whose assistance and collaboration made this project possible. I would like to thank my parents for instilling a love of learning in me from an early age. Most importantly, I would like to thank my partner Casey for all of her support and understanding which helped to keep me grounded throughout this process.

Vita

2006………………………………………………………… West Bend East High School

2010…………………………………..B.A. English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

2012………………………………….M.A. English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

2012-2017...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments...... v Vita ...... vi List of Figures ...... viii Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 2. Upton Sinclair, Rhetorical Fiction, and Literary Propaganda ...... 14 I. Toward a Theory of Literary Propaganda ...... 14 II. Upton Sinclair’s Rhetorical Fictions ...... 29 III. Speculative Fiction, Deliberative Rhetoric, and the Propaganda of the Future ...... 51 Chapter 3. Coming of Age and Ethics in Wright and Fauset ...... 89 I. The Moral of the Story ...... 89 II. The Ethics of Living Jim Crow ...... 105 III. The Morality of “A Novel Without a Moral” ...... 133 Chapter 4. Religion, Persuasion, and the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance ...... 158 I. Religion, Literature, and Education ...... 158 II. The Sermonic Voice, Authentic Cultural Expression, and the Utility of Religion 160 III. The Preacher in Context: Hurston on Community, Morality, and Oratory ...... 178 Bibliography ...... 213

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List of Figures

Figure 1 “Doing the Light and Very Fantastic,” Los Angeles Times ...... 86 Figure 2 “California Epicklement,” San Francisco News ...... 87 Figure 3 “The Fourth Horseman!,” Los Angeles Examiner ...... 88

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Chapter 1. Introduction

“Among the greatest means to mental health is knowledge gained from reading didactic literature. Happy is the man who can read and gain some good from all kinds of literature.”

From “Reading” in The University Magazine, 1881

In August of 1925, The Saturday Review of Literature published an essay by

Virginia Woolf simply titled “American Fiction,” a topic so broad as to almost seem presumptuous. In the essay, Woolf takes up the perspective of the English “tourist,” visiting America through its literary works. From Woolf’s perspective, the tourist wants one thing only: to be able to witness something that she has truly never encountered before. It is by this standard that Woolf’s tourist ultimately finds much of American fiction to be lacking. While there have been skilled writers born in America, their writing seems far too familiar from the English perspective. Many of the American writers who are often held up as the best their country has to offer—including James, Emerson,

Hawthorne, and Wharton—Woolf argues, are not Americans at all, suggesting that “they drew their culture from our books.” Instead, they offer only a somewhat inferior imitation of the English style, and “do not give us anything we have not got already” (1).

A small number of writers escape at least a part of Woolf's scorn. She deigns to admit that in Walt Whitman's writing, we can see, “the real American undisguised.”

Similarly, she finds some value in the writings of Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner, whose works do not seek to imitate the English style, but are instead, “resolutely and defiantly American” (1). This is somewhat encouraging to read. Previously, it had seemed that Woolf’s take on American fiction was wholly negative, consisting only of works that failed to meet the English standard. What, then, distinguishes these writers from their peers? True American authors, like Anderson, who have been “Denied…the richness of an old civilization,” seem to succeed mostly on their ability to take America as their subject, and document its humble charms. America, seen through Anderson’s eyes seems, “cheap, it is new, it is ugly, it is made of odds and ends, hurriedly flung together, loosely tied in temporary cohesion” (2). It is at once a provincial scene and one of cold, industrial modernity. Writers like Whitman and Anderson, while “simple and crude” in Woolf’s estimation, are at least not chasing a cultural ideal that is not their own.

The praise Anderson receives is coupled with an equal measure of condescension. Woolf suggests that his works are instinctive, sensual, and full of desire, that “in his determination to be ‘true to the essence of things’ he has fumbled his way into something genuine, persistent, of universal significance.” Long before we had a term for it, Virginia

Woolf had mastered the art of the backhanded compliment.

Those of us who study American fiction may take offense at Woolf’s suggestion, or even ask why we should value the perspective of a British author like Woolf on the field of American literary studies, a national culture which is not her own, and that has

been developing steadily in the years since the publication of her essay? One reason for

this is the fact that American literary studies have been developing in the shadow of

British authors such as Woolf from its inception. Institutional histories such as Gerald

Graff’s and Elizabeth Renker’s work have demonstrated the ways in which American

literature has remained at the margins of the university until relatively recently. By

Renker’s account, the first courses in American literature were deemed impractical, but

were scheduled in response to student demand. The discipline only solidified following a

call for a focus on political and civic education, rooted in nationalistic ideologies, during

the early years of World War II. Woolf’s view that American literature suffers for the

lack of an old civilization may be incorrect, but it might be safer to say that American

literary studies remains somewhat unsure of itself as a result of its relative youth.

While I am tempted to dismiss many of Woolf’s complaints as simple attempts at provocation, one of her claims remains relatively pertinent to the work I wish to accomplish in this dissertation. Much of American fiction is written by authors working from other cultural models. Likewise, some of the foundational works in American studies, such as F.O. Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the

Age of Emerson and Whitman argue for the legitimacy of American writing in part based on its connection to English and classical traditions. Later reassessments of the period by scholars such as David S. Reynolds have highlighted the equally important influence of

American popular writing on the works of these same authors, but this has done little to position American literary studies as anything other than a secondary or tertiary focus in an increasingly fragmented field of English studies.

It may seem like a peculiar choice to begin a dissertation on a particular national

literature with a digression about how that national literature has been viewed by those

outside of the field. However, I do so with a specific purpose: to call attention to how

literary value is assigned to some texts, denied to others, and how the relative value of a

given author’s works are in a perpetual state of flux. From Woolf’s perspective, the value of American letters could be determined in comparison to the British literary tradition, but for other readers, and certainly for contemporary scholars, this barely registers as a concern. As such, when we consider the qualities that we value in literature, there is very

little that remains fixed over time. As a result, there is very little that we should take for

granted. Qualities valued in one historical moment by one set of readers may be read as

unforgivable flaws by others. It is precisely one of these qualities, understood by many

readers as a flaw found throughout American literary history, that is the focus of this

project: didacticism.

For many readers and critics, referring to a work as didactic is harsh

condemnation, suggesting that a work is dull at best and completely artless at worst. It

seems necessary to pause here and clarify exactly what I mean by didactic fiction. After

all, in more recent scholarship, the descriptor “didactic” seems to mean little other than

its lingering negative connotations. Simply put, I follow the most common definition of

the didactic in art, being any piece of writing that serves either a primary or secondary

instructional purpose. Of course, this definition is broad, concerning fiction that both was

conceived of initially as a means of conveying social or moral lessons to the reader, as is

the case with the archive of American domestic fiction which has been well documented

in Lora Romero’s work, as well as less directly didactic works including crime films

produced under the Hayes Code, made with the mandate to make it clear to audiences

that “crime never pays.” With that definition in mind, a few questions remain. Aside from

deepening our field’s understanding of American literary history more generally, why is

this archive particularly interesting? To paraphrase Woolf, what does it give us that we

“have not got already?” Far more than conventional literature, didactic works are deeply

concerned with literature’s role as a social object. By that I mean, that the didactic fiction

that I wish to highlight in this project is written with an earnest desire in mind to play an

active role in public life by encouraging thought and action among its readers. This is not

meant to reinforce the old misconceptions about naive readership, so often repeated by

curmudgeonly critics such as Dwight Macdonald who viewed all mass culture as

deceptive dreck designed to hypnotize the simple-minded masses who consumed it thoughtlessly. Instead, I see this body of literature as uniquely positioned to play a role in society, as “equipment for living,” to borrow a phrase from Kenneth Burke. Burke argued that our understanding of literature was out of line with it practical function in society. He suggested that the proverb might be the closest analog for fiction’s place in the world.

Burke called proverbs “medicine,” providing those who hear them gain knowledge about how to navigate a variety of situations. As social situations tend to repeat over time, we need “words for them,” and proverbs serve this function (293). It follows, then, that literature might simply work as an extended version of the proverb, providing its readers with the ability to recognize recurrent situations, and to be prepared when they happen.

Positioning literature in this way, Burke suggests, could be a powerful act: one that could

5 help us to better understand literature, as well as its relationship to the social world.

Frequently, didactic novels are not pure expressions of beauty captured on the page.

Rather, they are attempts to empower their readers with knowledge of aspects of the world he or she may not otherwise encounter, empowering him or her to engage with the particular situation strategically. Didactic fiction, then, gives us a way into re-thinking our conception of why exactly people read literature and how it interact with their lives.

If didactic fiction can help the field of American literary studies to clarify its understanding of literature’s social role and can illuminate existing understandings of conventional literature, why is it that this aspect of cultural production has been overlooked in the past? In part, I would argue, that this is a result of a critical trend that emerged many years ago. The understanding that art of all kinds, but particularly literature and poetry, should be produced for purely aesthetic purposes, and conversely the rejection of didactic purposes in art, has been with us for some time. In the early nineteenth century, the didactic, in both poetry and novels, was understood as one of many common modes of writing. In some cases, novels were criticized for being “too didactic,” when their narratives were lost as a result of the inclusion of excessive non- diegetic moralizing. However, the understanding that didacticism and art should never meet did not come to be until close to mid-century. Edgar Allan Poe wrote extensively about what he called the “heresy of the didactic,” both in reviews of the Boston poets and in essays, such as the posthumously published “Poetic Principle.” In the years following his death, poets and critics echoed the sentiment, such as James Russell Lowell who wrote in “The Origin of Didactic Poetry,” “Put all your beauty in your rhymes/ your

morals in your living” (112). We know, then, that this assumption about the proper

function of literature is not something long-standing or natural. Instead, it is the result of

predominant tastes in a particular historical moment which were then adopted as a

convention of literary criticism for many years to come.1

In spite of this critical distaste for didacticism in literature, there is a through line

of didacticism in the American literary tradition. The earliest forms of American fiction

were explicitly didactic. First published in 1789, William Hill Brown’s novel The Power

of Sympathy is generally considered to be the first American novel. It tells the allegedly

factual tale of a young woman who succumbs to the allure of a dangerous seducer. By the

novel’s conclusion, both she and the seducer are dead, and the reader is provided with a

clear lesson about the dangers of promiscuity. Brown’s novel is not an isolated example.

In fact, many of the early examples of the American novel follow a similar pattern, such

as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Weber Foster’s The Coquette. These

novels and their descendants, the nineteenth century conduct novel and its related

periodical culture, represent the continuation of this tradition, however, our standard

literary histories prefer to overlook this didactic current. Instead, we prefer to think of the

nineteenth century as the age of Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, in spite of the

comprehensive studies by scholars such as Shelley Streeby and David Reynolds which

have highlighted the popular, sensational, and didactic reading practices of the broader

1 For an example of this shift in attitude toward didacticism in literature, compare two textbooks on poetry from the early and late nineteenth century. Richard Wharton, in his 1824 history of English poetry praised didactic poetry as a, “science of the highest utility” (818). Conversely, H.B. Charlton wrote in 1913 that, “Art and morality, or art and political philosophy are quite separate spheres, each with its own function and its own laws, in the one case, aesthetic, in the other, moral or political. Art is not didactic, nor, as art, is it to be judged by moral or political criteria: a twofold conclusion, twice true” (68). 7

reading public. I sketch this brief history of didactic fiction in American writing, which is

by no means comprehensive, to illustrate the persistence of this mode of writing, even

into the years that we call “the American Renaissance.” While some histories

characterize this period as one of both a turn toward the classical, and a great step

forward for the American literary aesthetic, this narrative ignores the equally important

and influential popular literary developments which occurred contemporaneously: the

rise of the dime novel, the expansion of mass media and periodical culture, and the

popularization of genre fiction. This archive of popular texts holds a double significance,

both as a part of the cultural milieu that gave rise to many of the major works of

American fiction that are still read and admired to this day, but even more so as the texts with which a significant portion of the population interacted on a regular basis.

Overlooking these texts, many of which are didactic texts, not only hinders our ability to understand their significance, but more importantly, the incomplete picture of American literary history that this provides is a skewed one, and one that does not include the literacy practices of a vast majority of readers. Even more significant is the erasure of the experience of groups that have been traditionally marginalized in literary history: women, working class people, and minorities. By writing a history of didactic fiction in American literature, I intend not only to bring this archive to the attention of the field at large, but to better represent the reading experiences of a broader range of readers, a project which is of particular interest to me as a first generation college student.

With that historical context in mind, the goals of my project not only seem somewhat immodest, but somewhat ill-advised as well. I position my research against

8 this long-standing misconception, which is as deeply ingrained as it is troubling. In what is a more conventional role for a dissertation, I am offering up this dissertation as an example of what Margaret Cohen has called “the great unread” (23). This previously untapped archive which I map throughout this project contains a multitude of texts, far more diverse and complex than previous critical assessments and dismissals would have led the field to believe. In doing so, I hope that my work can suggest to other scholars that these works are worthy of their attention, and that a few of those who read this will be intrigued enough to explore this subset of American writing. But this is a relatively common goal for a recovery project: bringing to light the previously unknown and arguing for its relevance. Less common is the suggestion that I would like to make about the significance of this archive to American literary studies more generally. As I understand it, didactic fiction is not simply a small niche of cultural production which we can overlook without consequences. Instead, it has been a persistent and important aspect of the American literary tradition. Looking past it to other styles of writing that are more palatable to our critical tastes seems not only irresponsible, but entirely disingenuous.

Criticism may be an evaluative task, seeking to elevate only the works of sufficient quality or complexity, but this is not the work of literary history. If the field of literary history is truly tasked with mapping the development of literature over time and space rather than simply highlighting the works that align with our critical preferences, then the omission of the didactic would seem to be a great one.

Given its long history in American writing, it seems impossible to overlook the role of the didactic in American literary history. Forgetting this fact hinders our

understanding of literary history in two ways. First, as previously stated, it omits a

significant archive of texts from the collections of texts that we teach and study as a field.

But more significantly, perhaps, is the way in which it skews our understanding of the

texts that are already frequently read and studied in universities across the world as

exemplary of American literary style. In Beneath the American Renaissance, David

Reynolds made a compelling case for the importance of popular literature to

understanding both the full extent of cultural production in nineteenth century America,

as well as texts by authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. This “subversive

literature,” he argued, was widely read by both the audiences of American literature, as

well as these major authors, and had a significant influence on their works. A common

thread among this body of subversive literature is that much of it at least purported to

serve some kind of instructional purpose. It is my goal in this dissertation to illustrate the

ways in which this dynamic remains consistent throughout later periods of American

literary history. In our current academic climate, it seems less necessary to argue for the

significance of less conventional literary archives in the wake of well-received studies of popular fiction by critics such as Ken Gelder. However, what remains less certain is the connection of these studies to the broader field of American literary studies. By demonstrating the centrality of the didactic to American literary studies well into the twentieth century, I hope to connect this dissertation to more established bodies of research of more conventionally literary texts, and help us to better understand both registers of fiction more clearly.

The literary texts chosen as case studies for this work may seem like an odd

assortment, some canonical and some obscure. For the purposes of this project, it was

important not to focus on a single author or genre as the goal of the project as a whole is

to demonstrate the breadth and variety of works that take part in a kind of didacticism.

Through this representative sample, we see the range of different topics, techniques, and

approaches to didacticism that populated the American literary scene of the early

twentieth century. Another project might have chosen to focus on one of these topic areas

in depth, however, placing political, ethical, and religious didactic texts side-by-side reveals a consistent pattern of literature of the early twentieth century that is composed and deployed to play an active role in cultural discourse. Further, examining this particular cross-section of texts allows us to consider the role that didacticism played in a number of different areas of cultural production in the early twentieth century.

Chapter 1 seeks both to define didacticism for the purposes of this project and to outline a particular political form of instructional art that I call “literary propaganda.” In order to better understand this subgenre of didactic fiction, I turn to Upton Sinclair, the rare author who openly identified as a propagandist. Sinclair’s work in The Jungle (1906) serves as an ideal case study of the most recognizable, and most literary form of propaganda to be found in the American literary tradition as it fuses elements of the

American literary realist tradition with narrative representations of oration. As we see throughout this dissertation, didactic fiction often summons forth a turn toward oral rhetoric as it explores the best ways to communicate and persuade in print. Through rhetorical readings of The Jungle and Sinclair’s fictionalized campaign narrative, I,

Governor of California (1934), I examine the ways in which literature can function

persuasively without practicing the kind of manipulation that is most often associated with the term propaganda. I close the opening chapter of the project with readings of two important examples of literary propaganda from the period, Huey Long’s speculative political memoir My First Days in the White House (1935) and Sinclair Lewis’s

dystopian satire It Can’t Happen Here (1935).

Chapter 2 examines the intersection of morality, race, and education in the

African American Bildungsroman of the early twentieth century. While moral education

in literature is most often associated with conduct books from previous centuries or

antiquated forms like the morality play, this period saw a surprising uptick in texts that

consider ethical matters through narrative. Further, works by Richard Wright and Jessie

Fauset demonstrate the utility of the coming of age story for the purposes of ethical

instruction. I examine Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945) and Fauset’s second

novel Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1928) as texts that follow a character’s

growth in racial consciousness and development of a personal ethics rooted in a kind of

ethnic solidarity. While the latter text is a work of fiction and the former is merely lightly

fictionalized, the instructional function of both becomes clear through the introduction of

narrative elements of redundancy, asides and meta-commentary that serves to instruct

readers on the ethical “takeaways” of a given scene.

Chapter 3 examines the tradition of religious didactic literature through fictional

representations of the folk sermon in works by writers of the Harlem Renaissance. While

the Harlem Renaissance is often thought of as a time of modernization and

12 experimentation, authors such as James Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston— neither of whom was especially committed to Christianity themselves—contributed significantly to African American cultural history by crafting works that educate readers about historical and contemporary religious practices. I examine Weldon Johnson’s

God’s Trombones (1927) and Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) through the lenses of cultural studies and rhetoric, finding that these works embrace tradition without succumbing to nostalgia, a temptation that would lead to a far less critical and much simpler text, while maintaining a complex and critical approach to the religious practices they incorporate. Weldon Johnson’s work weaves together conventions of African art and

African American religion to elevate the folk preacher to the venerated position of the poet-philosopher. Conversely, Hurston both celebrates the aesthetic prowess and leadership abilities of the folk preacher while producing a cautionary tale about his human frailty. Together, these works demonstrate a powerful evolution of the didactic tradition that allows both to educate readers on religious practices without glossing over the problematic elements of religious culture and its relation to systems of oppression.

Chapter 2. Upton Sinclair, Rhetorical Fiction, and Literary Propaganda

I. Toward a Theory of Literary Propaganda

In the introduction to his 1925 study of literary history, Mammonart, Upton

Sinclair presents his reader with a strong claim illustrative of his view of his own works as well as those of his contemporaries: “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda”

(9). The specter of propaganda has lingered over Sinclair’s writing over the course of the last century. It is a word that reviewers and academic critics have used to disparage the author’s writing, which many view, in the words of Morris Dickstein, as “more agitation than art” (41). In contemporary literary history, Sinclair is mostly remembered as a muckraker, as much a reporter of social conditions as a literary artist. While his works are rarely counted among the canonical literature of the early twentieth century, he maintains historical significance as an author whose works influenced public policy. His novel The

Jungle is often credited with leading to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act of

1906, though in actuality, the book’s influence was far more modest, only providing additional public visibility to an extant political movement (Arthur 81-3). In spite of this accomplishment, literary critics and historians have spent the last century noting both the aesthetic flaws and historical inaccuracies of the novel, further diminishing Sinclair’s

14 prestige in literary circles (Yoder 484). The consensus surrounding Sinclair’s literary career is that the author’s attempts to mix art with activism ultimately proved to be his aesthetic downfall.

For this reason, it seems strange that Sinclair would embrace the very term that was so often wielded by those seeking to demonstrate the inadequacy of his writing abilities. However, in a later edition of Mammonart, Sinclair clarifies his usages of propaganda in an addendum to the book’s introduction. He acknowledges that many readers associate propaganda with, “an evil enemy thing,” most frequently connecting it with the carefully controlled communications of governments during wartime. However,

Sinclair argues that this is only one specific example of propaganda. In an effort to broaden the reader’s understanding of the word, he cites the definition found in the

Standard Dictionary, which describes propaganda as, “Effort directed systematically toward the gaining of support for an opinion or course of action.” While the term may be tainted by negative associations, Sinclair offers a less insidious example, reminding his reader that, “The Jesuits have been carrying on a propaganda of their faith for three hundred years, and one does not have to share their faith in order to admit their right to advocate it” (10a). It is possible to see Sinclair’s claim as a disingenuous attempt to provoke his critics. However, for the purposes of this project, I intend to take it as a serious expression of the author’s aesthetic philosophy that is particularly revealing about the nature of this often misunderstood term.

By embracing the term propaganda and by taking up the mantle of the propagandist, Upton Sinclair is making two important gestures. First, he is arguing for the

political relevance of art, not only his own, but for all art. Second, by self-identifying as a purveyor of propaganda, Sinclair invites his reader to approach his works with a certain degree of skepticism. If Upton Sinclair’s public persona is that of a propagandist, or at least an advocate for a variety of causes, then readers will necessarily approach his works not as unmediated representations of lived experience, but instead as works that are designed to be persuasive. Knowing this, they can compare the information on offer in the text with their prior knowledge, or they may be encouraged to seek out further information from different perspectives. As a result, the form of propaganda practiced by

Sinclair is functionally quite different from the “evil enemy thing” that the term so often calls to mind.

Film historian Alan Sennett’s research on Cold War-era propaganda provides a

useful reminder of just how uncommon Sinclair’s gesture is. In this period, the United

States government produced large quantities of propaganda intended for audiences in the

U.S.S.R. In spite of the undeniable persuasive purpose of these texts, the United States,

“eschewed the propaganda label and claimed to produce ‘information’ to counter the

‘propaganda’ of the regimes of which democratic Western society disapproved” (46). The

choice to position propagandistic works for a Soviet audience as objective information

rather than carefully constructed persuasive propaganda demonstrates a significant but

often overlooked divide within this category of cultural production. While the same term

is used to describe Sinclair’s overtly persuasive political literature and the United States

government’s covertly persuasive communications, there are numerous practical

differences between the two. Both address their readers differently, with Sinclair

presenting his works as persuasive and state media obscuring their persuasiveness. Both

are produced in vastly different contexts, with Sinclair operating for the most part as an

individual and state propaganda being the official output of a government. Finally, both

play vastly different roles in the public sphere. Sinclair’s novels are just one of many

sources of information on a given topic, while state media is often paired with the

suppression of alternative accounts of events through censorship. This pairing of

persuasive media and state censorship is one of the greatest causes of concern among

theorists of propaganda such as Walter Lippmann who wrote at length about the dangers

of allowing public opinion to be manipulated through propaganda. In practice,

propaganda from other sources, from individuals or activist organizations, rarely if ever is

paired with the ability to censor conflicting reports. Instead, it must exist in the same

media ecology as other forms of information, or even conflicting forms of propaganda,

which are all consumed and processed by their respective audiences. Individual audience

members, having been exposed to different information and propaganda sources, will

bring different perspectives based on their pre-existing knowledge, the information they have encountered, and their inherent biases.

In spite of this, different literary critics and historians rarely differentiate the two

kinds of propaganda. When critics express concern that a persuasive political text seems

to be approaching the realm of propaganda, or when a work is dismissed as being “too

close to propaganda to be art” as Susan Suleiman puts it in her account of the ideological

novel, no attempt is made to note the difference in power dynamics between an

individual author producing a persuasive political text and a government producing

persuasive political media and suppressing other media sources (3). It is this first kind of

propaganda that will be the primary focus of this chapter: the category of politically

motivated imaginative writing. In order to distinguish these works from official state media, I propose the term “literary propaganda,” by which I mean those didactic literary works that seek to move their reader to a politically motivated action. This distinction is largely one of emphasis. Works of “pure propaganda” may exist solely to persuade their reader, with their aesthetic elements serving only to dress up their respective arguments in a more pleasing fashion. In contrast, writers of literary propaganda attempt to maintain

a balance between the aesthetic and argumentative portions of their work, rarely if ever

allowing the work’s persuasive task to overtake its literary pleasures. In doing so, they at

least aspire to be considered literature, regardless of their critical reception.

The use of the term literary propaganda to describe Sinclair’s work may seem counterintuitive as it pairs the often disdained designation “propaganda” with the much- valued “literary.” In order to justify this choice a brief series of definitions will prove helpful for several key terms: didactic, propaganda, and literature. The simplest definition of “didactic” is the most neutral, defined in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as anything that is “designed or intended to teach people something.” In literary terms, Northrop Frye provides a useful definition of didacticism in The Harper Handbook of Literature: “Since ancient times, literature has been assumed to have two functions, instruction and entertainment, with sometimes one and sometimes the other dominant. Literature intended primarily for instruction or containing an important moralistic element is didactic, but the range of emphasis and quality is wide” (151). Both of these definitions

provide a useful starting point for understanding didactic literature; however, they do not

take into account the connotations the term has accrued over time. Webster’s secondary

definition provides some insight into the pejorative use of the term, suggesting that that

didacticism is, “used to describe someone or something that tries to teach something

(such as proper moral behavior) in a way that is annoying or unwanted.” It is this secondary meaning that surfaces in many discussions of didactic literature, such as claims that Sinclair’s writing can become “unrelentingly didactic,” suggesting that the conclusion of the novel pursues its instructional ends in an excessive or aggressive manner (Van Wienen 170). While it is one of the goals of this project to salvage the reputation of didactic fiction, and demonstrate the nuance and complexity to be found in instructional art, a definition that excludes this implied excess would be fundamentally incomplete.

The term propaganda is similarly fraught, as evidenced by Sinclair’s addendum clarifying his understanding of its definition. For the purposes of this chapter, the definition provided in Mammonart is mostly satisfactory; however, considering an additional dimension of the term, one more directly focused on art and literature, will be useful going forward. Kenneth Burke wrote extensively on propaganda, and is one of the few theorists to note that deceptive or manipulative propaganda is only one subtype of a much broader category. For Burke, art and propaganda are inextricably linked, though he sets apart the kind of art that Sinclair called “deliberately propaganda,” which Burke explains as, “art that recognizes the capacity to be both influenced by and be an influence on audience’s attitudes and beliefs” (qtd. in Hedengren). Crucially, Burke’s definition

19 foregrounds the fact that the propagandistic work is constructed with an awareness of its relationship to the attitudes and beliefs of its audience. This does not mean that other texts exist independent of these ideas and relationships, but that they do not engage with them as directly. Further, Burke argues elsewhere that works of “pure art,” by which he means works of art composed for narrowly aesthetic ends, pose a moral danger under the capitalist system, as they work only to maintain a system that Burke considers to be unethical. Instead, “under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art” (321). This propagandistic art must also serve a “forensic” function, seeking to educate its audience about the causes of unequal socio-economic conditions. This forensic function is essential to propaganda. Burke’s theorization of propaganda and his use of the term to explain political art provides a useful precedent for the discussion of propaganda as a literary phenomenon. While

Burke’s theorization is rooted in the context of twentieth-century debates on art and literature, his assertion that there is value to be found in persuasive texts seeking to propagate ideologies through literature remains invaluable.

While didacticism and propaganda are somewhat controversial terms, they are far simpler to pin down than literature. What literature is or how we define the literary quality has been under consistent debate since the birth of the discipline. While many definitions have been offered in years past, Terry Eagleton’s work on the matter has been among the most influential. He begins by examining common definitions such as

“language made strange” or “imaginative writing,” and finds both to be lacking. In the case of imaginative writing, he points to the many non-fiction works that are often

20 included in discussions of literature including notable sermons, works of political theory, and autobiographies (1). Similarly, language made strange falls short as a measure of literariness when recognizing that “ordinary” language is something that does not exist or is highly subjective, depending on one’s perspective (4). In opposition to these existing definitions, Eagleton offers only the suggestion that literature is “a highly valued kind of writing,” while noting that this value is highly unstable, changeable, and deeply rooted in cultural and ideological contexts. Significantly, that which is in one time and place considered not to be literary may be or may become literary in another (9). As the value- judgment inherent in including or excluding a work from the category of literature has “a close relation to social ideologies,” interrogating the boundaries of this category can be somewhat productive even while recognizing its arbitrary nature.

With these terms established, we return to the category of politically motivated imaginative writing which I term “literary propaganda.” By literary propaganda I mean those didactic works that seek to move their reader to a politically motivated action. This classification serves three purposes. First, it is an attempt to distinguish these texts as the work of individuals arguing for their own beliefs in the public sphere, contributing to, but not suppressing rational-critical discourse. These works should not be considered a part of the same category of cultural production as the official state media such as the Soviet

Pravda or the output of the North Korean film industry as both operate as extensions of the state media and hold a monopoly on their specific mode of public discourse. Second, it sets apart those works that maintain a balance between their persuasive and pleasurable elements. Frye’s definition of didactic literature stresses that many works instruct and

entertain, but with “sometimes one and sometimes the other dominant” (151). Literary

propaganda is distinguished from its non-literary counterpart by maintaining a balance

between the two. Third, the application of term “literary” to works recognized as

propaganda is an assertion of the value of these texts to our collective understanding of

literary history. The exclusion of didactic or propagandistic works from the category of

literature is, as Eagleton suggests, a value-judgment with its roots in social ideologies.

Barbara Foley has written an account of these ideological circumstances, which emerged

in the early twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, some of the harshest condemnations of

propaganda took the form of fearmongering about the influence of Soviet propaganda in

the popular press from American conservatives. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s,

publications such as the Saturday Evening Post featured numerous articles about the dangerous influence of foreign, and most often Soviet, propagandists. Princess Julia

Cantacuzène, an American who married a Russian general and prince in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution, warned Post readers about the “parlor propagandists” in their midst, suggesting that, “Atheistic societies, free-love cults, Utopian internationalism or pacifist movements…are some of the forms given to the warped visionary groupings of the people who are aiding the Bolsheviki” (21). Cantacuzène outlines a bleak vision of the American people, easily taken in by the falsified narratives produced by propagandists in Moscow. She closes by expressing her exasperation with how easily taken in her peers seem to be by the menace of propaganda, “It is very strange, in the light of all this situation, to see women, conservatives, clever writers and practical men of business, besides all the faddists, gayly [sp] taking part in supporting the terrible

22 propaganda which aims to raise to preeminence the Communist Red tyranny throughout our world” (77).

Far less expected is the rejection of propaganda on the left, as writers associated with the Communist party were encouraged to avoid producing works that operated as propaganda and instead to produce realist works which attempted to represent social conditions, allowing the reader to understand social inequities with minimal authorial persuasion (138). In similar terms, critics on the left such as Philip Rahv condemned the didactic and propagandistic nature of proletarian literature, arguing that these works placed higher value on agitation than aesthetics. In doing so, Rahv and his contemporaries were able to distance themselves from associations with the Communist

Party and the Soviet Union (140). In subsequent years, Marxist critics would continue this trend of dismissing didactic texts, regardless of their various rhetorical and didactic strategies (156). Foley suggests that these arguments from the literary left laid the groundwork for the later rejection of didactic and political fiction in the New Critical era

(167).2 The assumption, then, that propaganda is fundamentally artless and therefore not worthy of literary study, is a holdover from a decades old debate informed by Cold War era ideology. Removed from this ideological context, it should be possible to locate the value of these propagandistic works to literary history. Suggesting that writers are engaging in propaganda does not mean that their work is deceptive or artless. Instead, it

2 While Foley suggests that Rahv and his contemporaries on the left provided the foundation for the New Critics’ attacks on propaganda and didacticism found in political fiction, it is worth noting that Rahv’s Partisan Review group and the New Critics first took shape around the same time. Subsequently, it may be more accurate to say that both are contemporaneous phenomena. 23

simply suggests that their works seek to add to the vast realm of discourse which the

reading public draws from.

Propagandistic texts matter for our understanding of literary history because in

overlooking them, literary historians risk downplaying the role that fiction plays in the

public sphere. Few today would argue for the same purely aesthetic approach to forming

standards of literary value that Harold Bloom favored when asserting that “criticism is

not a program for social betterment, not an engine for social change” (Bloom). However,

it is a holdover from this critical attitude that causes some critics to reflexively reject

those works that Suleiman has called “too close to propaganda to be artistically valid”

(3). While some aspects of his political theory are troubling, Walter Lippmann’s theories

of public discourse and mass media serve as a useful reminder of how cultural objects

function as a part of the public sphere. In his best-known work, Public Opinion, Walter

Lippmann outlined a theory of public discourse in early-twentieth-century America. He argued that an individual citizen can never really know the world in its totality as any one person may only experience what happens in his or her immediate vicinity (4). As a result, each person must rely on second-hand accounts of the rest of the world to try to develop an understanding of it (15). In many cases, this information comes in the form of mass media. Using these second-hand accounts, people develop what Lippmann calls a

“picture in their heads” or a vision of the world as they understand it (4). This picture is always an approximation, varying widely in accuracy and quality based on the information that is available to each person and their interpretation of it. The information received can be inaccurate due to human error. It can be purposefully manipulated. It can

be written in an unclear manner. All of these factors complicate the ways in which a

person will process the information, which is in itself a fundamentally unpredictable

process. For Lippmann, this is a problem. If citizens living in a representative democracy

know the world only through imprecise approximations of it cobbled together through

hearsay and newspaper articles, how can they be trusted to make informed political

decisions? Lippmann argues that the only way to solve this problem is for some outside

body to sort and process information for the people, allowing them to form properly

informed opinions (370). Lippmann suggests that a group of political scientists such as

himself could do the task admirably, a fact that isn’t particularly surprising. As with

Plato’s suggestion that those best-suited to oversee his utopian Republic would be a class

of philosopher kings, Lippmann believes in his own profession’s ability to serve as

universal arbiters of information.

I recount Lippmann’s theorization of public opinion and its difficulties not to

advocate for his conclusions, but rather to accept his initial premise. For the most part, we do only experience the world through “the pictures in our heads,” and these pictures are formed primarily through our interaction with various media. While we do not need an

organization run by a group of modern-day Walter Lippmanns to sort through

information and determine what is fit for circulation, I do believe that there is value in

paying attention to how these pictures are formed. While critics may take issue with

literary works that attempt to directly influence their audience’s worldviews and actions,

Lippmann’s theories remind us that this kind of influence will take place regardless of the

intentions of authors or the preferences of the literary critical community. Therefore,

25 instead of simply considering propagandistic texts to be artless or condemning those works that too closely resemble this despised cultural category, critics and literary historians would do well to develop language for analyzing how different literary works operate persuasively.

Recognizing the significance of literary propaganda presents a new problem: conventional tools for literary analysis may not apply to these works. As Barbara Foley has argued, labeling a work as propaganda should not be a negative remark on its quality, especially if one share’s the author’s commitments and ideals. However, “to call a body of literature propaganda entails an obligation to analyze it as such” (250). But what are the appropriate methods of analysis for propagandistic, or even didactic, works? After all, these texts are written for the purpose of conveying a particular message, and as a result, lack the kind of ambiguity that makes methods like close reading necessary. I’d like to suggest that didactic texts and particularly propagandistic texts, can be best understood through the lens of rhetorical analysis. Lloyd F. Bitzer has described rhetoric as, “a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to object, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (4).

Though authors of literary propaganda such as Sinclair communicate primarily through fiction, their texts are distinctly rhetorical. Bitzer explains further that, “The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change. In this sense rhetoric is always persuasive” (Ibid.). For Sinclair and others like him, fiction is the tool used to engage the audience’s attention, hoping that the reader will become the mediator

26 of the change they want to see. Additionally, as didactic and propagandistic texts resist ambiguity, the question of what is being said is not a particularly compelling one for them. However, how an argument is made or a message communicated in these works is of the utmost importance, making the techniques of rhetorical analysis well suited for the task.

A useful model for this kind of rhetorical analysis of fictional works can be found in the scholarship of drama critic and playwright Sam Smiley. Smiley undertook the task of writing an account of the didactic plays of the Depression era in America, which he calls “the drama of attack,” or those works in which the “dramatist conceives his works as instruments of change” (ix, 4). Smiley views these plays as rhetorical as they are examples of, “a practical art of language…characterized by a persuasive speech by a speaker; in which knowledge operating through proof controls the formulation of the action; in order to effect a given response in an audience” (10-11). That does not mean that these works are without aesthetic merits entirely, but Smiley suggests that an analysis that seeks to understand how they communicate will ultimately prove more productive.

In Smiley’s estimation, the didactic play functions largely as an argument made by the playwright to the audience. Subsequently, he makes the logical assumption that the clearest way to assess this kind of drama is through each example’s use of the three appeals of classical rhetoric: “(1) the personal character of the speaker, ethos; (2) his power of stirring the emotions in the audience, pathos; and (3) the speech itself as evincing truths or apparent truths by means of persuasive arguments, logos” (16). Smiley also subjects his didactic subjects to analysis by way of Aristotle’s three kinds of rhetoric,

or three kinds of speech, political, forensic, and epideictic. Political speech “attempts to

persuade an audience to act or not act; it is exhortation” (Ibid.). Forensic rhetoric

“attempts to accuse or defend for the sake of justice. The object of these speeches is to

establish justice with regard to actions that occurred in the past” (17). Finally, epideictic rhetoric “praises or censures a man or an institution by proving the reasons for granting honor or imposing condemnation” (Ibid.). Smiley notes that he draws from Aristotle’s rhetorical theory primarily to determine which methods of persuasion are at work in the didactic dramas he is concerned with.

The remainder of this chapter will explore the possibilities that are made available by taking a rhetorical approach works of Upton Sinclair which exemplify the categories of didactic fiction and literary propaganda by both emphasizing its educational function and encouraging its reader to take action. In order to come to terms with Sinclair’s body of work, we will need to accept his statement that he is a writer of overt propaganda, but that this does not mean that he sought to manipulate his audience, at least not on a fundamental level. Instead, his works are designed to persuade. It will be our task going forward to determine the means of persuasion deployed in his novels. One key element of this project will be to demonstrate that the means of persuasion throughout these works are not monolithic. While Sinclair is often remembered as a writer of a series of similar novels exploring interrelated socio-political issues, his works are in fact many and surprisingly diverse. Throughout his career, Sinclair was the author of works that resemble naturalist novels, such as The Jungle, King Coal, and Boston. However, in later years, Sinclair moved away from a strictly naturalist style and experimented with genres

28 including speculative fiction and mystical allegory. With each new genre came new rhetorical approaches which provide additional perspective on the author as a literary propagandist.

II. Upton Sinclair’s Rhetorical Fictions

The Jungle serves as a useful reminder of the gulf between the popular memory of the author’s work and how his novels function in practice. While the novel is often best remembered for its most grotesque moments in which characters are maimed, deceived, or inadvertently being dissolved into fertilizer, it does not rely on these kinds of shock effects alone in order to engage and persuade its reader. The opening pages of The Jungle feature descriptions of an event that is far less grim than the novel’s most famous scenes utilizing a tone that is more descriptive than argumentative. The novel opens not with visions of urban decay, squalid living conditions, or the exploitation of workers. Instead, it begins with a wedding feast. Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite, a young couple originally from Lithuania, have recently arrived in Chicago and have even more recently been married. They celebrate their union in the traditional Lithuanian fashion: with a feast that feeds anyone in the neighborhood who wishes to attend. The gathering is large and boisterous owing to the “throng before the door” and the music that was audible from

“half a block away” (1). Ona, called by the narrator, “one of God’s gentlest creatures,” is described in detail from the “conspicuous” whiteness of her newly purchased muslin

29 dress, veil, and gloves to her flushed complexion (2). The narrator notes that her

“happiness [is] painful to look upon,” observing that:

you could see the pain of too great emotion in her face…She was so young—not quite sixteen—and small for her age, a mere child; and she had just been married—and married to Jurgis…of all men, to Jurgis Rudus, he with the white flower in the buttonhole of his new black suit, he with the mighty shoulders and the giant hands. (Ibid.)

These descriptions of Jurgis and Ona are conspicuous both for their idealization of the couple, and for how neatly each embodies established norms of masculine and feminine identity. Ona’s petite figure, fair complexion, and comparative frailty is opposed by

Jurgis’s immense frame, “thick black hair” and prodigious strength (2-3). While the narrator describes them as “one of those incongruous and impossible married couples,” their contrasting qualities only serve to reinforce their exemplification of a heteronormative ideal. This description of Jurgis and Ona’s idealized bodies may seem innocuous at first as literary history, and popular literature more particularly, has never experienced a shortage of beautiful and idealized characters. However, on closer examination, these descriptions of Jurgis and Ona prove to be strategically significant, and act as the opening gambit of the novel’s earliest rhetorical appeal.

While there are many possible reasons that the novel might begin with this celebratory scene, perhaps the most crucial to the novel as literary propaganda is that it helps to establish the audience’s identification with Jurgis and Ona. By showing them to be conventionally attractive and amiable young people, and by showing them to be very much in love with one another, the novel prepares the reader to follow these characters through the many trials they will soon face. If we read The Jungle as a work of

30 propaganda, meaning that its primary function is to persuade its audience and move them to action, it would follow that the novel was carefully crafted with an understanding of its audience in mind, including both an image of who the author believes his readers to be and what their beliefs and biases entail. While we cannot reconstruct a clear picture of either Sinclair’s sense of who made up the American reading public, or the actual demographic makeup of that group, some historical phenomena are sufficiently well documented to be worth considering as potential influences on the text.

Since long before the term was first used around 1840, nativism has been prevalent in the United States. Historians such as Tyler Anbinder and John Higham have tracked the development of anti-foreign political groups throughout American history.

While these factions varied greatly in membership and points of emphasis, Higham argues that they are all united by the fear that, “some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within” (4). Higham is careful to note that nativism is not simply anti-foreign sentiment, but a particular kind of xenophobia that is strengthened by its link to nationalism. “While drawing on much broader cultural antipathies and ethnocentric judgements, nativism translates them into a zeal to destroy the enemies of a distinctly American way of life” (Ibid.). Nativist groups waxed and waned in both power and influence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

However, it is important to remember that anti-foreign groups and biases remained a significant part of the American political landscape relatively consistently. “The

Progressive Era” roughly defined as the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first

two decades of the twentieth, is largely remembered as a time of significant reform.3

However, even among progressive politicians and their supporters, anti-immigrant sentiment remained a powerful influence. Between 1901 and 1910, an estimated

6,300,000 immigrants arrived in the United States, largely settling in major cities and drastically altering the demographics of American urban landscape (Painter 263). For many progressives living outside of larger cities, a distrust of both immigrant populations and urban centers comingled to deepen that antipathy felt toward both, “The almost complete identification of the immigrant with his urban environment prevented a sympathetic response toward either on the part of many reformers” (Higham 117). Less troubling, but far more common was a general sense of indifference and aloofness toward immigrant populations even among the most committed progressive political advocates

(Higham 118). Outside of reform movements, the response to increased immigration was far more disturbing. Not only were a significant number of nativist political organizations founded in the early twentieth century in response to increased immigration, this period also gave rise to the eugenics movement in America. Nancy Ordover has argued that eugenicists were, “No fringe element, they exerted direct influence on immigration debates…Eugenicists and eugenics sympathizers could be found in the House of

Representatives, the Senate, and the White House” (5).

This is the political landscape in which Sinclair composed The Jungle. While the novel was originally serialized in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, the author

3 For an account of these reform movements and the broader American political scene during the Progressive era, see Nell Irvin Painter’s history Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. 32 would have been aware that he could not rely on even a leftist audience having deeply felt connections to his characters, nearly all of whom are recent immigrants to the United

States from Eastern Europe. When the novel was eventually published in complete form, intended for a broader audience, it would be even less likely that the reader would be inclined to sympathize with immigrant characters. The idealization of Jurgis and Ona, then, acts as the first step in creating a bond of sympathetic identification with characters from whom many readers might have otherwise recoiled. This is especially important if the reader is going to be moved by the tragedies that will soon befall the young couple and those around them. By playing on the reading public’s predisposition to identify with young, beautiful people in love, the novel sets the reader up to feel sympathy for Jurgis and Ona, even in spite of any pre-existing prejudices he or she may have concerning immigrants. In this way, the text’s rhetorical approach is crafted to appeal most directly to its intended audience, so that ultimately it would prove to be a more effective piece of literary propaganda.

The novel does not rely on the reader’s romantic ideals alone to establish their identification with Jurgis and Ona. Instead, the first chapter of the book does a considerable amount of work to demonstrate that Ona, Jurgis, and other members of their community are motivated by values similar to those of most Americans, even those with nativist inclinations. The narrator describes the festivities in detail, from the surprisingly lavish offerings of food to the lively music that scores the proceedings. The narration places a considerable amount of emphasis on two of the key features of the veselija, or the wedding feast: welcoming anyone who wishes to attend, and a dance called the

acziavimas, which can last for several hours. The open nature of the festivities greatly

inflates the cost of the proceedings, however, guests traditionally help to offset costs

through the acziavimas:

The guests form a great ring, locking hands, and, when the music starts up, begin to move around in a circle. In the center stands the bride, and, one by one, the men step into the enclosure and dance with her…when the guest has finished, he finds himself face to face with Teta Elzbieta, who holds the hat. Into it he drops a sum of money. (13-14)

If enough of the attendees contribute, the cost of hosting the event remains manageable, no matter the size of the gathering or how many uninvited guests join in. In the case of

Jurgis and Ona’s wedding, however, the couple soon notices that there are many people in attendance who were not invited, and even worse, many of these people are not offering anything through the acziavimas. Instead, they simply come to eat and drink, leaving unceremoniously as soon as they’ve had their fill. Ona worries that they will be unable to cover the cost of the event as a result. Jurgis’s reply to his wife is simple, he tells her, “Little one…do not worry—it will not matter to us. We will pay them all somehow. I will work harder” (19). This statement, “I will work harder” is repeated throughout the novel, and it serves as Jurgis’s reply to many of the problems he faces. He asserts that he will work harder after learning that housing will cost more than expected, and it is echoed in the narration after Jurgis and Ona have a child together (80, 134).

In fact, at the novel’s outset, Jurgis finds it difficult to believe that anyone with his willingness to work and natural physical aptitude could struggle to maintain financial solvency. On first arriving in the stockyards, he is told that men have arrived only to have to wait many months to find any kind of employment. Jurgis scoffs at this, instead

questioning the aptitude of those who have failed to do so, “what sort of men? Broken-

down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have spent all their money drinking…

Do you want me to believe…that with these arms people will ever let me starve?” (24).

This statement makes clear Jurgis’s confidence in his own work ethic and physical well-

being, however it also significantly mirrors the well-established American discourse of

self-reliance, casting doubt on the worthiness of those who are unable to make their own

way. Further, it taps into contemporary discourses on eugenics and social Darwinism

which suggest an inherent superiority and physical predestination of long term survival

for able-bodied individuals. Jurgis’s firm belief in his ability to make himself a financial

success through his labor, and his distrust of anyone who fails to do so, closely aligns him

with these ideological systems. Like many other Americans, Jurgis believes to a naïve

degree that his physical fitness makes him both worthy of success and incapable of

failure. In believing this, however, Jurgis fails to realize, to borrow a phrase from

Disability Studies, that he is only “temporarily able-bodied.”4 Jurgis’s emphasis on labor

and his belief in the possibility of self-making effectively works to counter many of the

stereotypes that nativists propagated about immigrants throughout the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries: namely that they were unable or unwilling to work (Higham 55). By aligning Jurgis and other immigrants who work in the stockyards with the American

4 This will become increasingly pertinent as the novel progresses. Jurgis at first succeeds in the stockyards due to his physical strength, but it soon injured on the job. Losing some of his physical aptitude leaves him only fit to work in the fertilizer production area of the stockyards, a job that leaves him with an additional respiratory ailment. With these physical impairments, Jurgis finds himself struggling to maintain his employment, and he becomes one of the “Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings” that he once despised, left with no other option but to panhandle for a living, and ultimately turning to drink as a form of self-medication. 35

myth of self-making, The Jungle creates a link of sympathy through shared values

between these characters, the real workers in the stockyards, and at least one

representative group in the novel’s audience.

While the opening chapter of The Jungle does not seem to be making an explicit argument, it is in fact the first part of Sinclair’s rhetorical approach. This process of demonstrating that these characters have aspirations familiar to readers and that their values are similar to those of many “native” Americans makes an implicit argument through ethos, one of the three appeals of classical rhetoric. Readers begin to see that Ona and Jurgis are credible characters through whom this narrative will be focalized, and will perhaps come to trust the veracity of the account that they will read. This trust extends to the narrator and Sinclair himself, as both are implicated in the telling of the story that follows. In addition to arguing for the truthful nature of the novel’s account of events in the Chicago stockyards, this appeal to ethos also makes a secondary argument targeted at the reader who may hold nativist beliefs or prejudices: it suggests that immigrants, whatever prior impressions may exist in a person’s mind, are worthy of sympathy. This may not seem especially significant, given that sympathetic identification is common across many forms of literature and media. However, when we consider this particular novel’s connection to public opinion, and particularly Lippmann’s formulation of it, the importance of this process becomes much clearer.

For many readers, immigrants likely belong to the parts of the world that they understand primarily through the “pictures in their heads.” Lacking personal experience, they rely on what they read or are told second-hand. With this information, they form

36 stereotypes which shape the way that they understand the world. These impressions of the world are constantly in flux, and are changed with the introduction of new information.

The Jungle seeks to take part in the process of facilitating this change. Does that mean that the text replaces the existing impressions that readers have of immigrants in their entirety? No. Instead, Lippmann suggests that:

[The] human mind is not a film which registers once and for all each impression that comes through its shutters and lenses. The human mind is endlessly and persistently creative. The pictures fade or combine, are sharpened here, condensed there, as we make them more completely our own. They do not lie inert upon the surface of the mind, but are reworked by the poetic faculty into a personal expression of ourselves. We distribute the emphasis and participate in the action. (159).

Subsequently, the process of persuading a reader is not one of simply replacing a pre- existing notion with a new one. It is not one of intellectual domination. Instead, like

Lippmann tells us, it is a process of hybridization, in which one “picture” is combined with another as readers’ impressions of how the world functions takes the new information provided into account. Having contributed new information to this picture in his reader’s head, Sinclair then begins the narrative in earnest. What follows is the most well-remembered series of events in the text. Jurgis goes to work in the stockyards, as does his entire extended family. The conditions there are abhorrent and lead to a sequence of tragedies that befall them: Jurgis is injured on the job and subsequently terminated, Ona is raped by her supervisor, Jurgis assaults her rapist and is jailed, Ona dies in childbirth, and their first child drowns in the street. It is a series of tragic events that critics to this day fault for its comprehensiveness, questioning if all this misfortune could plausibly befall one family (Wade 80). In terms of the novel’s propagandistic

project, these events serve two distinct functions. While they are heaped upon a small set

of characters, Sinclair asserted that the events experienced by Jurgis, Ona, and others in

the novel mirror through fiction the kinds of suffering he observed in his investigation of

the stockyards, which in turn demonstrates to the reader the dangers of unregulated

capitalist systems (Sinclair Autobiography 110).5 Additionally, they serve as a narrative catalyst, freeing up Jurgis to leave the stockyards and explore labor in other contexts. As he travels, he finds that agricultural laborers, political operatives, and workers in other industries in and around the city face similar struggles (246). Moving outside of the stockyard, and placing Jurgis in a number of different economic contexts serves an important function in the text. Without this section, the text would read essentially as an indictment of the particular labor situation of the Chicago stockyards. However, by moving outside of this perspective, if only for a few chapters, the novel presents the argument that this situation is not unique. Instead, workers throughout capitalist economic systems will always be the victims of exploitation and abuse. Workers such as

Jurgis may be told that they are free to seek employment elsewhere if they do not like the conditions that they labor under. However, the move outside the stockyards suggests that this is not an adequate solution, and that the solution does not lie in altering the operations of the stockyards alone.6 Instead, the only way to remedy the situation would

5 Suleiman has written about the contradictory nature of didactic literature which seeks to argue a position primarily through fictional demonstration. While it does seem like an unlikely tactic to provide evidence of real injustice through fictionalization, possibly leading readers to question the veracity of the account provided, this is not the novel’s sole didactic approach. 6 Of course, this is precisely the reading of the text that many took away from it. Audiences were incensed about the possibility of being sold impure food and seemed to care little for the treatment of the workers in the stockyards. This mismatch between intentions and reception famously led Sinclair to muse that when writing The Jungle, he aimed at his readers’ hearts, but hit them in the stomach. 38 be to dramatically alter the workings of the capitalist system itself, which the novel will soon argue, is at the root of Jurgis, and other worker’s troubles.

Moving from the particular situation depicted in a novel to a more universal claim has long been a struggle for political literature. Novels that depict individuals suffering because of the breakdown of economic systems are relatively common. Frank Norris’s depiction of the effect of excessive speculation on businessman Curtis Jadwin in The Pit, for example, is truly devastating. However, readers of The Pit may view the text as an indictment of Jadwin’s personal failings rather than a systemic problem, as the man erroneously believes himself to be the “master of chance” (Collins 568). After all, the novel offers only one case study from which readers must necessarily draw their conclusions. The Jungle attempts to remedy this problem not by depicting the lives of many workers, but allowing Jurgis to experience far more than a single worker is likely to in his working life. Jurgis’s move from career to career may strain the norms of conventional realism, however, in doing so it provides readers with a more complete, broader reaching picture of life under capitalism than would otherwise be possible.

Following Jurgis’s travels and attempts to take up several different occupations, he finds himself back in Chicago, working for a time as an operative for a local political boss. As with all of his other potential careers, this one ends with Jurgis’s termination, leaving him to live on the street, begging to meet his basic needs (319). At this point, the novel takes a significant turn in terms of its didactic approach. While the early stages of the novel work to build affective connections between the character and the audience, and its middle section demonstrates the extent of the graft at work in the stockyards and in all

39 surrounding economic systems, the novel’s conclusion is far less preoccupied with

“showing” readers the poor conditions at work than it is about “telling” them of potential solutions. The most notable and potent propagandistic aspects of this section of the novel are a pair of speeches given by political activists. Jurgis originally takes to attending political speeches to get off the streets for a time (324). While homeless, these meetings provide a brief respite from the cold, and attendees are frequently offered food and drink.

He pays little attention to what is said, especially at the rallies for the Democratic and

Republican candidates, whose political operations he has come to view as largely unscrupulous. However, he eventually finds himself at a rally that changes his perspective drastically, and alters forever his relationship to the political system he inhabits.

From the moment he entered the hall, there were indications that this speech would be different from the others. Though he is immediately skeptical of the proceedings, Jurgis finds himself compelled to remain in his seat, staying a number of hours before dozing off (341). He wakes to find someone nudging him, and fears that he is about to be ejected from the hall, or worse, arrested for vagrancy. Instead, it is a woman who suggests, “If you would try to listen, comrade, perhaps you would be interested” (342). He is bewildered at first, wondering who this woman was, but she had turned her attention quickly away from him. Instead, he chooses to look toward the speaker, and is immediately transfixed:

It was like coming suddenly upon some wild sight of nature—a mountain forest lashed by a tempest, a ship tossed about upon a stormy sea…He was speaking rapidly, in great excitement; he used many gestures—as he spoke he moved here and there upon the stage, reaching with his long arms as if to seize each person in 40

his audience. His voice was deep, like an organ; it was some time, however, before Jurgis thought of the voice—he was too much occupied with his eyes to think of what the man was saying. (342-3)

Before he even is aware of the words uttered by the speaker, Jurgis is enraptured simply by his tone and delivery, noting that his voice was, “trembling, vibrant with emotion, with pain and longing, with a burden of things unutterable, not to be compassed by words. To hear it was to be suddenly arrested, to be gripped, transfixed” (343). In this moment, the novel relies heavily on redundancy, one of the primary strategies of the didactic novel as identified by Susan Suleiman. In short, to encourage clarity and limit alternative interpretations, didactic authors convey meaning through multiple kinds of address such as dialog, narration, and action (Suleiman 42). In the case of Jurgis’s response to the speaker Sinclair provides a number of redundant indications of the orator’s skill: Jurgis’s sudden attentiveness, and the narrator’s words inform us of the power of this speaker. Ideally, this information should make readers aware that they too should find what the speaker has to say to be worthy of their time, if not also persuasive.

Having informed readers of the strength of the speaker’s presence, Jurgis begins to hear the words being spoken. In fact, for the remainder of the chapter, the speaker’s words are rendered on the page with little to no interruption. There are only momentary breaks in which the narrator clarifies who is speaking through the use of dialog tags, a dramatic pause deployed by the speaker before beginning the final phase of his oration, and a brief paragraph that notes Jurgis’s reaction to the speech. Otherwise, the nine remaining pages of the chapter are an unbroken representation of fictional oratory (343-351).

Readers enter into the speech only toward its conclusion. The speaker comments that the audience may be inclined to agree with what he says, but that they may doubt the possibility of change, returning to their lives with little hope of altering their situation.

The speaker describes these circumstances, which closely mirror the challenges that

Jurgis has faced, “To toil long hours for another's advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the specters of hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death” (343) He argues that if they simply leave the speech and return to their daily lives, the situation will simply repeat itself. They will find themselves attending another speech again telling them about the injustices they face, an experience that the speaker argues is common to working people across the world. “I travel to the ends of the earth, I find the same accursed system—I find that all the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in the service of organized and predatory Greed! And therefore I cannot rest, I cannot be silent” (343-4). The speaker’s rhetorical approach is at first unclear, especially due to the small portion of his speech that is rendered in the text. Whatever techniques he deployed earlier in the speech, however, he concludes by using epideictic or ceremonial rhetoric. This branch of rhetoric is often understood to be concerned with the assigning of praise and blame. It seeks to understand some aspect of the present, and either provide credit for how that state came to be, or make note of the root cause of a terrible situation. In this case, Jurgis’s predicament and that of other works like him are explained to be the result of one

particular factor: namely, the system of “predatory Greed” that they are unwilling

participants in.

After a short silence, the speech enters its final phase, he addresses the audience

directly, saying, “I plead with you…whoever you may be, provided that you care about

the truth, but most of all I plead with the workingman” (345). He takes his time before

stating his case directly. Eventually, it becomes clear that what he wants for the audience

is a simple growth in their awareness of their situation. He says that he believes that at

least one of them in the assembled crowd will hear his words, and will be forever

changed as a result, “there will be some one man whom pain and suffering have made

desperate, whom some chance vision of wrong and horror has startled and shocked into

attention. And to him my words will come like a sudden flash of lightning to one who

travels in darkness” (346). That one man in turn will spread the message he has shared

today. He again returns to describing the present situation: an economic system in

Chicago in which women are forced into prostitution, men labor in jobs that put their

health and safety at risk, and children go hungry in spite of their parents’ best efforts

(347-8). All the while, “There are a thousand—ten thousand, maybe—who are the

masters of these slaves, who own their toil…They live in palaces, they riot in luxury and

extravagance—such as no words can describe, as makes the imagination reel and stagger,

makes the soul grow sick and faint” (347). Having stated this one goal, he offers another.

He asks the audience if they would like to change this system under which they toil. He assumes that they would, but he asks further how that change would come about? Would the employers better the conditions of their workers on their own? Would elected

officials take action without prompting? He has his doubts. Instead, he suggests that

change will come from, “a movement beginning in the far-off past, a thing obscure and unhonored, a thing easy to ridicule, easy to despise; a thing unlovely, wearing the aspect of vengeance and hate” (350). Notably, he does not say what this movement is, for its very name earlier in the novel was quickly dismissed. Of course, readers would likely intuit that the speaker is a representative of the local Socialist party.

For Jurgis, this speech provokes what is akin to a religious conversion experience.

Once he heard the speaker’s words for the first time, he is described as “trembling” and

“smitten with wonder.” At the conclusion of the speech, the crowd reacts with similar enthusiasm: “The audience came to its feet with a yell; men waved their arms, laughing aloud in their excitement.” Jurgis and those around him cannot contain their excitement, cheering uncontrollably. The narrator describes the profound effect the speaker had on

Jurgis: “There was an unfolding of vistas before him, a breaking of the ground beneath him, an upheaving, a stirring, a trembling; he felt himself suddenly a mere man no longer—there were powers within him undreamed of, there were demon forces contending, age-long wonders struggling to be born” (351). Of course, the experience of hearing a powerful speech delivered is not the same as reading it rendered through text alone. As the narrator notes, the speaker’s words were only one small part of what Jurgis

had just experienced. The speaker’s “presence” was just as important, “it was his voice: a

voice with strange intonations that rang through the chambers of the soul like the

clanging of a bell—that gripped the listener like a mighty hand about his body, that shook him and startled him with sudden fright, with a sense of things not of earth, of mysteries

never spoken before, of presences of awe and terror!” (Ibid.). While readers are provided

with the full text of the speech that so moved Jurgis, these other aspects of the oration are

inaccessible to them. Instead, they are expected to trust in the narrator’s account of its

power. However, if response from academic and popular critics is any indication, readers

traditionally have not found the speech, and the others like it that occur in the chapters

that follow, to be as effective as Jurgis believes it to be. The Chicago Tribune’s review of

the novel took issue with many aspects of the novel, but commented on the book’s final

chapters with particular displeasure, stating that:

[As] a whole it is crudely constructed and that it has as its object merely the propaganda of socialism is made clear by the last half dozen chapters, which consist of speeches at socialistic meetings, in which well known arguments are rehashed. This ending for a novel is unconventional, but also is rather unsatisfactory. (“No use”)

Intuitively, this response only seems natural. After all, on the page, the speech appears rather imposing, with a single paragraph of uninterrupted dialog lasting multiple pages.

Regardless of the content, it would seem likely that many readers would find this kind of unbroken monologue to be exhausting.

However, more important than the way the text is presented on the page is the context of the speech itself. It will be useful here to consider the difference in the rhetorical situation of the fictional audience in the text and the readers of the novel. While the rhetorical situation is a common term in rhetorical theory, it was most notably defined by Lloyd Bitzer as consisting of three distinct parts, exigence, audience, and constraints

(6). Bitzer defines exigence as “an imperfection marked by urgency,” and more specifically, an imperfection that can be addressed or assisted through the application of

discourse (6-7). In the case of the speech, the exigence is clear, as the speaker addresses

those assembled on the inequities produced by the capitalist system, a kind of

“imperfection” that can be understood by both readers and audience members alike. The

urgency of that imperfection, however, is quite different for the fictional audience

members and for the reader, leading to the first difficulty raised by the speech’s rhetorical

situation. For Jurgis and the other workers from the stockyards who make up the

audience in the novel, the speaker is telling them about the root causes of their daily

troubles. Not only that, he provides them with action they can take in the very near future

to better their situation. The imperfection of capitalism is something they have

experienced daily, and for Jurgis, learning that he could work to change this is a powerful

realization indeed. This may not be the case for the early twentieth-century middle-class reader, or even the contemporary literary critic. The speech is written in the second person, addressing the workers and the abuses they faced directly, appealing to their personal experience. To those outside of this direct audience, this rhetorical approach will likely fall a bit flat.

Finally, for the fictional audience, the speech has the advantage of Kairos, or proper timing. It is presented to Jurgis at both a pivotal moment in his own life, and in the days leading up to a major election. Jurgis has been prepared to accept this particular argument by the personal tragedies he has experienced, and by his travels around the country that have shown him that the injustices he has experienced are not a unique problem of the stockyards. These events remove some of Jurgis’s ideological constraints, such as the social Darwinist logic that guide his thinking early in the novel, and open his

mind to the possibility of a systemic rather than a personal cause for his troubles. Further,

by positioning the speech prior to this election, the fictional audience is given a clear course of action. They need only to vote for a socialist candidate, and the system that oppresses them will slowly begin to crumble. The failure of this speech, then, is primarily the inability to address both of these rhetorical situations at once. The reader outside of the stockyards has not experienced these personal tragedies on which many of the speech’s appeals depend, at least outside of the storyworld. Further, unlike our central character, the moment at which the reader encounters the text may not be as ideal. The early twentieth century reader may not have an election in the immediate future, and the contemporary literary critic, being nearly a century removed from the novel’s publication remains even further from this rhetorical situation.

Regardless of how it has been received, the speech proves to be a pivotal moment for Jurgis. After the event ends, he seeks out the speaker, hoping to thank him. The speaker encourages Jurgis to join the party, but Jurgis remains skeptical. Sensing his hesitation, he suggests that Jurgis speak with Ostrinski, a recent Polish immigrant, as he too has experienced life in the stockyards. Jurgis goes home with Ostrinski and as the two men walk together, Ostrinski explains a number of core socialist concepts to the younger man, including the idea of class consciousness and the reality that employers will always pay the lowest wage that any worker is willing to accept. Ostrinski serves as an expert figure who guides Jurgis through the plot of apprenticeship, a key feature of the ideological novel as explained by Susan Suleiman (65). By both attending the speech and speaking with the older, more experienced worker/activist, Jurgis moves from a state of

47 ignorance--being so unaware of socialist thought that he bristled at the idea that he may have just attended a socialist rally--to a state of knowledge, eventually joining the party and becoming a speaker in his own right, telling meetings such as the one he had attended of the horrors to which he had been subjected. In doing so, he completes the other aspect of the apprenticeship plot by moving from passivity, accepting that he had no other option than to accept the conditions in the stockyard and work there without protest, to action, by working with party representatives.

With Jurgis’s apprenticeship completed, the novel concludes with one last climactic speech. While these speeches have been widely dismissed as the weakest points of the novel, they are in fact the clearest moments of communication in the text, and subsequently are useful to an understanding of the text as literary propaganda. The speech at the first Socialist rally was a broad sketch of the injustices experienced in the stockyards, seeming to directly speak to Jurgis’s experiences to that point, avoiding direct discussion of socialism itself while illustrating the ways in which workers are taken advantage of across the world, the final speech makes no apologies for providing readers with direct instruction. The speech is delivered on election night as a crowd gathers, waiting to hear results. Unsurprisingly, the Socialist party sees great gains in the election.

While they are not yet outpacing larger parties like the Democrats in most areas, the

Socialist candidates are earning more votes by small margins across the country, and gaining ground at a much faster paces within the districts in and around the stockyards.

“There were other wards in which the Democratic vote had been actually surpassed, and in two districts, members of the state legislature had been elected. Thus Chicago now led

the country; it had set a new standard for the party, it had shown the workingmen the

way!” (395). In response to these encouraging returns, the speaker, again unidentified

but described as “young, hungry-looking, [and] full of fire,” tells those assembled that they must “Organize! Organize! Organize!” (395-6). He tells them that just because many have voted with them, this does not mean that they are all socialists. Instead, they must be brought into the fold in earnest, by encouraging them to attend meetings, a process that will “bind them to us!” Once the election concludes, and after the establishment politicians are defeated, the party will work to establish “municipal ownership,” which he says will be “the greatest opportunity that has ever come to Socialism in America!”

Having done this, the path forward for the speaker appears clear:

“And then will begin the rush that will never be checked, the tide that will never turn till it has reached its flood—that will be irresistible, overwhelming—the rallying of the outraged workingmen of Chicago to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” (396)

With these lines, the novel concludes, and in doing so, it takes a notable turn. The speaker begins with a call to action in the present tense, telling those assembled to “Organize!

Organize! Organize!” before turning his attention to the immediate aftermath of the election (395-6). He encourages them to avoid complacency in the months to come and to continue their efforts in earnest. If they do, he states with certainty that “We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” (396). These lines bear repeating as they represent the novel’s first real engagement with the future. To this point, the novel’s project has been primarily descriptive, informing audiences of the present conditions in 49 the stockyards and the treatment of workers throughout the American capitalist system, doing so with the tools of epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and blame. Shifting tense to the future and telling both those assembled in the fictional crowd, and by extension the implied reader, what “shall” happen when workers organize represents a turn toward the use of deliberative rhetoric in the novel. This form of rhetoric is understood to mean the attempt to encourage an audience to pursue one alternative over another and in doing so, influence future actions. To this point, the novel has provided its reader with little in the way of an alternative, and has rarely if ever suggested a course of action to bring about a different political and economic situation. Instead, it has focused primarily on diagnosing the root causes of the inequities experienced in American society in the early twentieth century. In constructing his literary argument, Sinclair likely believed that it was necessary to first demonstrate to the reader the kinds of exploitation taking place in the capitalist system of the Progressive Era. Only having completed this task by using Jurgis’s story to exemplify the kinds of suffering possible in this system, could he provide a true call to action. He does so here by encouraging both the fictional audience within the novel and the reader to “organize,” a nebulous suggestion which may have led some to become more involved with their local socialist party. Given the critical response to the novel which praised its depiction of the horrors of the stockyards while bemoaning its didactic conclusion, however, it seems unlikely that many were moved by this appeal. Perhaps one explanation for this failure is the novel’s abrupt change in rhetorical approach, introducing its deliberative appeal in the final chapters and drastically changing its style of address. In subsequent works, Sinclair would experiment

50 further with the integration of rhetorical techniques into fiction, relying on deliberative rhetoric to an increasingly greater degree. In doing so, these works seek to remedy The

Jungle’s shortcomings as a work of literary propaganda: one that was perhaps able to alter the picture in its readers’ heads, but largely unsuccessful in moving them to take action on a larger scale.

III. Speculative Fiction, Deliberative Rhetoric, and the Propaganda of the Future

It may seem strange to regard Sinclair’s best-known work as a failure, however, the author seemed to share this perspective. Sinclair discussed his disappointment with the novel’s reception openly and freely, and his comments on the matter have been repeated by critics and biographers, perhaps to excess. However, they are worth returning to here as they inform a change that would soon take place in the author’s approach to his work as a propagandist. While he had hoped that readers would view the book as Jack

London did, as “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery,” they instead responded most directly and most actively to the book’s depiction of unsanitary conditions for food preparation (Sinclair Lifetime 20). This public outrage added to an already existing political movement toward stricter regulations on the meat packing industry and established Sinclair’s reputation as a muckraking crusader for food safety, even if that was not the issue he most hoped to call attention to with the novel. In his autobiography,

Sinclair quipped, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach”

(126).

Given the response of readers who embraced the novel’s critique of food safety while ignoring its arguments for a better future through socialism, it should not be a surprise that Sinclair reconsidered his approach in subsequent novels. In the year following the novel’s publication, Sinclair took on two projects that worked more directly to bring about this future. The first of these was Helicon Hall, a seven-acre community modelled after Brook Farm. With the founding of this intentional community, Sinclair sought to create a space for like-minded individuals who wanted to live together in accordance with socialist principles (Autobiography 128).7 The community was intended to be a space where labor could be handled collectively and where individuals could pursue their creative work with fewer domestic distractions (Mattson 71-73). In total,

Sinclair’s experiment attracted fourteen families who lived collectively for the four- month duration of Helicon Hall’s existence. However, like Brook Farm before it, Helicon came to an end after an unexpected fire. As the colony’s primary source of funding,

Sinclair felt obligated to reimburse his fellow colonists for their personal losses, and as a result, the author ended up losing most of the money he had earned from the success of

The Jungle (Autobiography 134). In spite of its disastrous outcome and its short duration,

Sinclair would later reflect on his time at Helicon Hall fondly, claiming that he had “lived in the future,” if only for a moment (qtd. in Jensen viii).

During his time at Helicon, Sinclair composed his first non-fiction work, The

Industrial Republic, laying out a plan to implement a socialist economy in the United

7 Helicon Hall is also significant for bringing Upton Sinclair into contact with a young Sinclair Lewis who worked as the colony’s janitor. Sinclair later joked that Lewis was the colony’s greatest success, asking “What other group ever raised a janitor to with the Nobel Prize?” (qtd. in Jensen viii). The two writers maintained a correspondence which lasted many years. 52

States, and predicting that “the revolution will take place in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912” (xiv). Where The Jungle fixed its narrative attention on present conditions, demonstrating to readers the ways in which the present systems of economic and governmental organization were flawed, Sinclair instead attempted to show readers an alternative: a vision of a future that he believed to be inevitable. While The Industrial Republic may seem far removed from the kinds of works

Sinclair is best remembered for, it is not, in fact, an aberration in the author’s bibliography. It was immediately followed by another work that centers on showing readers possible futures. After the fire at Helicon, Sinclair moved his family to Bermuda and began work on a play titled The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000 (141).

While originally composed as a play, Sinclair was unable to organize a production, leading him to re-write it first as a serialized novel, published in Appeal to Reason and ultimately self-publishing it in complete form (3-4). It presented its readers with a vision of American capitalism extrapolated ninety-three years in the future, with all its early twentieth century vices and excesses only exaggerated in that time.

As a literary work, The Millennium is only of passing interest. It imagines a possible future in which wealth has become concentrated to an even greater degree than either during the Gilded Age or even the actual twenty-first century. The wealthy live in isolated enclaves, but find what limited contact they have with the laboring classes to be unacceptable, leading to the construction of a building called “The Pleasure Palace” in

Manhattan to keep them truly separate from “vulgar life” (5). Its future residents celebrate the completion of The Pleasure Palace with a decadent party (11). Attendees

include not only members of the new aristocracy, but representative members of different

professions and classes: a journalist, a clergyman, a poet, a politician, and a butler (12-

20). Also in attendance is Billy Kingdon, son of a wealthy family who left his family

fortune behind to advocate for the working people. Billy has come back to convince a

woman he loves to run away with him in a newly invented super-sonic jet (1-10). The

party is interrupted with news of a nuclear explosion, and only a small number of people

are able to use the jet to escape (46).8 When they land, they find that all life on Earth has been wiped out. The survivors soon realize that they must work to rebuild society in the

ruins of The Pleasure Palace. Much of the book’s social criticism takes the form of

imagining the wealthy as being unable or unwilling to work, even in a post-apocalyptic world (63). Rather than following Billy’s suggestion that they work cooperatively for the survival of the human race, the survivors instead attempt to organize their colony after models of previously existing social systems, cycling through slavery, feudalism, and capitalism in relatively quick succession. Presented in microcosm, the inequities of each are amplified. As they live under capitalism, the survivors wonder why the majority must labor tirelessly while two individuals, “the owners,” own the means of production. This leads to a revolt, and the founding of a second colony, one based on socialist principles

(183). They call it, “The Co-Operative Commonwealth,” the same name Sinclair uses for the future American socialist state in The Industrial Republic.

8 While The Millennium predates experiments with nuclear weapons by a number of decades, the apocalyptic event it depicts is the result of experiments with a fictional unstable radioactive element called “radiumite” (39). The ensuing explosion looks far different than an actual nuclear event in that it destroys all human and animal life, but leaves the landscape and infrastructure largely intact. 54

Neither Helicon Hall nor The Millennium register as significant events in literary

history; however, there is reason to believe that they were both formative events for

Upton Sinclair as a writer and an activist. Buoyed by the positive response to The Jungle,

but frustrated with its ineffectuality as a call to action for the reading public, the author

turned his attentions to these projects which attempted to leave behind the flawed

conditions of his present in favor of attempts to imagine and subsequently build a more

ideal future. Historian and Sinclair biographer Kevin Mattson noted this moment as one

of transition in the writer’s career, arguing that during the months after The Jungle was

published, “Sinclair was making the change from reporter of social conditions to prophet

of better society” (Mattson 69). Referring to Sinclair as a prophet may seem grandiose, but it is a title that Sinclair claimed for himself frequently during this period of his career, most notably doing so in The Industrial Republic. He claims to speak of the coming

revolution not as an agitator, but “as a scientist and prophet,” a claim that he clarifies

early in the book’s introduction, “This book is an attempt to interpret in the light of

evolutionary science the social problem of our present world; to consider American

institutions as they exist at this hour—what forces are now at work within them, and what

changes they are likely to produce” (vii). While they may at first appear unusual in the

context of Sinclair’s body of work, The Industrial Republic and The Millennium are in

fact pivotal texts that reveal the author’s developing fixation on writing works that will

influence his audience’s future actions, or put another way, on writing more effective

literary propaganda.

If The Jungle is a text that is largely rooted in its present, turning only to the

future that it wants to imagine in its final lines, then Sinclair’s subsequent projects

represent an inversion of this pattern, making only passing reference to their present

historical moment and turning almost immediately to either desirable or detestable version of future events. In the context of The Jungle’s failure to shore up support for

socialism in America, the focus on futurity seems to be a logical choice, and one that held

the potential to further the effectiveness of his works as literary propaganda. A description of present events, framed through epideictic rhetoric, can effectively lead audience members to praise or blame those shown to be responsible for those conditions coming to pass. However, without an effective picture of how events could or should be different in the future or a suggested change in course of action, this praise or blame remains largely meaningless. With The Millennium, Sinclair sought to deploy the form of speculative fiction as a kind of deliberative rhetoric, the same rhetorical technique used in

The Jungle’s closing lines presented in a different manner.

While the two are rarely discussed in tandem, the goals of speculative fiction and deliberative rhetoric are closely related to one another. Deliberative rhetoric, as previously mentioned, is the branch of rhetorical theory concerned with persuading an audience to follow or not follow a course of action. It deals with future events and their possible outcomes. Similarly, speculative fiction is often understood, as Gary K. Wolfe has argued, to be fiction that considers possible future events (122). James Gunn has offered a more specific definition, arguing that speculative fiction is specifically concerned with using imaginative writing to examine the effects of technological and

56 social change (6). Gunn’s definition particularly suggests the rhetorical potential that exists in the genre. As with deliberative rhetoric, authors of speculative fiction present their audiences with an account of prospective future events, extrapolated from present conditions. In many cases, these depictions of future events carry with them an implicit argument that audiences should strive to achieve or avoid the future shown in the text.

For Gunn, one of the central questions that speculative fiction elicits from its reader is

“how do we get from there to here?” (11). This question is likewise at the core of deliberative rhetoric.

While we see Sinclair engaging with rhetorical forms most directly in novels such as The Jungle through the use of embedded speeches, his speculative works deploy this branch of rhetoric in an attempt to move the audience to action in order to bring about his fictional account of the future. On closer examination, The Millennium is a text that effectively deploys the techniques of deliberative rhetoric in the guise of a post- apocalyptic narrative. The novel begins in a largely descriptive mode, picturing an extrapolated version of Gilded Age capitalism that is even more decadent than its early twentieth century counterpart. It is a non-realist take on the kind of argumentation practiced in the majority of The Jungle, argumentation through exemplification. It could also be viewed as a reductio ad absurdum of the capitalist system, arguing that if economic trends continue to develop along similar lines, then the comically polarized society of the novel is what will come to be. However, after the explosion that leaves only eleven people alive on the earth, the novel begins presenting a variety of different methods of organizing society. These different systems, ranging from slavery to a

57 simplified form of capitalism are shown to be impractical. In doing so, the text presents

Billy’s socialism as the most desirable social organization among a number of undesirable alternatives (68). This process which plays out over the course of the novel is one of deliberation in which we see the community attempt many different systems of social organization and conclude that socialism is in fact best.

While Sinclair’s earlier novels tended to be rhetorical in nature, this is the first case where the majority of the text is presented as a kind of deliberative rhetoric.9 While

The Millennium may lack the extended representations of speeches found in The Jungle, the technique is the same whether the mode of delivery is narrative or oratory. Its argument is designed to persuade the reader to view socialism as a more appealing alternative when compared to capitalism. To some, this may seem troubling as the form of argumentation used by the novel is hardly subtle, and conventional wisdom in literary criticism tells us that perhaps the only acceptable form of didacticism in literature is that of an indirect nature. However, if we consider the text and how it operates, it is difficult to imagine a reader being manipulated. Earlier responses to didactic fiction such as Susan

Suleiman’s suggest that the didactic novel could dominate the reader ideologically due to its realism. Seeing a realistic rendering of a world that they recognize as their own, the reader, in her estimation, risks passively accepting the novel’s storyworld as an unmediated representation (10-11). However, in the case of The Millennium, or any work of speculative fiction, this kind of slippage between the real world and the storyworld is

9 Sinclair is hardly the first author to employ this technique. He is just one of many writers of utopian, dystopian, and science fiction who have used the novel form to imagine desirable or undesirable alternatives to present modes of social organization. What is unique about Sinclair is his position as a writer whose works straddled categories of literary genre and prestige. 58

not possible. The work presents itself as artificial, and as a model of a possible future.

This open artificiality results in a curious mental process. Where other forms of news,

information, and propaganda are incorporated more directly into the picture in the

reader’s head, speculative texts with a propagandistic component require readers to

perform some degree of critical reading, translating the work’s allegorical elements, and

understanding how the futuristic text applies to the present moment.

In arguing that this turn toward speculative writing is a significant moment in

Upton Sinclair’s career, I do not mean to suggest that he broke completely with the style

established in The Jungle. In fact, he produced a series of novels similar to The Jungle

over the next several decades, including King Coal, Boston, and Oil!. However, in

addition to these realist works which remained focused on documenting past and present

events, the author also produced a range of different works that operated as literary

propaganda through different methods and genres. His speculative works which use

deliberative rhetoric as their primary form of argumentation prove to be some of his most

rhetorically complex work.10 The Millennium remains Sinclair’s only example of what

many readers would recognize as speculative fiction in the common usage of the word.

However, in the years to come, Sinclair would work to develop a speculative literary

style that functioned as a form of fictional deliberation, but that did not require an

apocalyptic event to imagine social change taking place. The Millennium is at its most

10 In the years between The Jungle’s publication and his death, Sinclair would continue to argue for socialist policies through the production of a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts. These include a novel about the Virgin Mary travelling through time to experience modern capitalism (Our Lady, 1938), a children’s book about gnomes (The Gnomobile, 1938) and an eleven book adventure novel series spanning the first half of the twentieth century (The Lanny Budd Series, 1940-1953). 59 persuasive when it uses the colony of survivors to demonstrate the absurd aspects of socio-economic structures by creating a scaled-down version of a national economic system. However, it presents socialism as a viable alternative to the other systems the survivors attempt and fail to live by while quickly glossing over the implementation of socialism in the colony. Instead the only version of life we see in the Co-Operative

Commonwealth is the community’s anniversary celebration, which is conveniently enough, a day when no one is required to work at all. As a result, the book perhaps leaving the reader with a potentially positive impression of socialism in the abstract while providing very little information about how exactly to bring about this better way of living, and what life under this new economic structure would actually look like.

Sinclair’s subsequent speculative works would not have this same difficulty. In fact, one of his most significant works set in the near future consisted almost entirely of detailed descriptions of political policy and its implementation. In 1933, Upton Sinclair announced his intention to run for Governor of California as a Democrat, having previously attempted two runs for congress as a member of the Socialist party (Mattson

168). At the core of his campaign was his “End Poverty in California,” or EPIC, plan, which proposed that the state government should nationalize idle factories and farms and employ those out of work during the depression to run them (Governor 14). It was an ambitious and complex plan which attracted a surprising amount of support given its relatively radical nature (Mattson 177). However, centrist Democrats and his Republican opponents campaigned vigorously against Sinclair and his EPIC plan, facetiously referring to it as, “Empty Promises in California.” These opponents, as well as numerous

California business leaders such as film executive Irving Thalberg, marshalled a variety

of media forms to attack Sinclair including political cartoons and newsreels (Sinclair

Candidate 172).

In spite of this opposition, Sinclair proved to be a surprisingly effective politician,

and perhaps less surprisingly an effective self-promoter. In the early days of his campaign, Sinclair self-published pamphlets explaining the EPIC plan and began circulating newsletters to EPIC supporters. He also started work on another project, a novella titled I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty. As the title suggests,

the novel sets out in narrative form an imaginative account of Sinclair’s campaign and

time in office. Its subtitle bills it as “A True Story of the Future,” and the front cover

asserts its significance, “This is not just a pamphlet. This is the beginning of a Crusade. A

Two-Year Plan to make over a State. To capture the Democratic primaries and use an old

party for a new job. The EPIC plan: (E)nd (P)overty (I)n (C)alifornia!” Considering

Sinclair’s experiment with speculative fiction in The Millennium as well as some of that

work’s shortcomings, I, Governor of California appears to be an iteration on a similar

rhetorical approach. Once again, the author presents his audience with a possible future,

but in this case, that future is not so far out of reach.

The text begins not with a narrative, but with a brief introduction from Sinclair

written in the first person. As is the case with many seeking political office in America,

Sinclair insists that the idea to run for Governor was not his own, and in doing so he

begins the text by placing himself in the tradition of other reluctant American political

figures including George Washington, “In spite of the resolutions I made to keep out of

politics, I found myself thinking continually about [the suggestion that I run for

Governor]” (1). In spite of Sinclair’s well-known socialist beliefs, those calling on him to run for the position are Democrats, and wish for Sinclair to represent their party. These opening lines act as the author’s attempt to position himself politically. In spite of this reputation, he argues that the positions he has taken are more closely in line with the ideals of democracy, and that this entitles him to lead a “takeover” of the Democratic party, just as Robert Lafollette did with the Republican party in Wisconsin and Hiram

Johnson did in California (7). Just as the early pages of The Jungle appear to be designed to enlist the support and sympathy of readers for its immigrant characters, Sinclair does the same for himself in the opening pages of I, Governor of California. It is only after establishing his connections to the Democratic party that he lays out his platform, explained in one simple phrase, “I propose a slogan, brief and simple: END POVERTY

IN CALIFORNIA!” (Ibid.). He explains further that, “there is no excuse for poverty in a civilized and wealthy State like ours…I repeat that this can be done and I know how to do it. If I take up the job I will stick until it is finished, and there will be no delay and no shilly-shallying” (7-8). Rather than laying out a list of positions on a variety of issues,

Sinclair then explains the premise of the book: “I put my proposition in the form of a history. In the pages that follow you will find a record of public events in California beginning August, 1933, and ending December, 1938,” before telling readers that they will need to decide their part in the events depicted: if they will be “Washingtons and

Jeffersons,” or nameless “tories and royalists” (8).

While the introduction is written in the first person, Sinclair begins his “People’s

History of California” in the third. It begins with a Democratic Party meeting held one evening in August 1933. Party leaders had gathered to discuss allowing Sinclair to register as Democrat and become the party’s candidate for Governor. What little dialog there is in the scene is mostly strategic discussion, positing that nominating Sinclair will allow the Democrats to attract voters from many third-party organizations. It is only after a considerable amount of debate among those assembled that Upton Sinclair, the character, is asked his opinion of the proposal. His reply begins simply enough, stating,

“It means one thing to me, the possibility of doing a definite job. I have a program clearly in mind, and would like to outline it to you and get your reaction” (12). This simple preamble is followed by a monologue by Sinclair, the character, which continues uninterrupted for about three and a half pages. In structure, it is not very different from the speech that converts Jurgis to the socialist cause in the final chapters of The Jungle, however, diegetically, it is positioned quite differently. This is not Sinclair’s first campaign speech where he tries to rally the support of the Democratic base. Instead, this is simply the character attending a small gathering, and as a result, the extensive nature of his explanation is somewhat jarring. He begins by attempting to explain the cause of the

“real crisis in the State,” which he believes to be “overproduction” and

“underconsumption” (12). Having identified the possible origins of the problem, Sinclair then turns to the solutions currently being offered by the state and federal government.

He is particularly critical of the efforts of the National Recovery Administration, noting that while the organization’s efforts are ambitious, they had not yet curbed the

unemployment crisis (12). Meanwhile, the state has taken possession of large tracts of

land across the state previously owned by individuals who were unable to pay their taxes.

Sinclair suggests that these two problems, the large number of unemployed Californians

and the large quantity of seized land, could together hold the solution to the state’s

problems by establishing “land colonies for the unemployed” (14). These colonies would

at first take the form of large cooperative farms and living quarters for workers, and

would in time grow to resemble self-sufficient communities, that would first provide their

residents subsistence, before eventually providing them with sustainable comfort (Ibid.).

After the initial explanation of his plan, those assembled raise a few questions,

some simply seeking clarification, while others raise more concrete objections. However,

Sinclair the candidate is mostly able to satisfy any doubters present. With their concerns

addressed, perhaps too easily, Sinclair asks them what they think of the plan, and more

importantly, “Could the Democratic party of California be won to that program?” (17).

The answer is unsurprisingly supportive, and perhaps positive to a hyperbolic degree.

One supporter says, “[Every] intelligent person in the State would join the Democratic

party to help put that program across” (17). Sinclair concludes the meeting by restating

the major points of his plan and providing a few additional policy suggestions, most

notably a plan to eliminate the sales tax and create a state income tax applicable to only

the very wealthy (17).11 The chapter concludes rather abruptly with the author

11 The details of the tax plan differ in later editions of the novella, seemingly the result of the expert input that Sinclair seeks out in the narrative. It seems likely that he similarly vetted his ideas in his actual campaign. 64

proclaiming that the points discussed constitute his “Two Year Plan” and discussing the

adoption of the worker bee as the official symbol of the EPIC plan.

Significantly, Sinclair portrays the development of his plan as a dialogical process

in which the specifics of the campaign are being worked out. As with the speech that

concludes The Jungle, Sinclair begins by employing epideictic rhetoric as his primary

tactic, placing blame for the crisis in the state and the nation more generally, before

turning to deliberation by proposing an alternative. However, while this section of the

novella resembles a political speech in form, it diverges significantly by contextualizing

Sinclair’s plan with fictional positive responses. Sinclair’s proposals may have been met

with a considerable amount of support in actuality, however, by portraying this meeting

fictionally, Sinclair presents a carefully composed and perhaps unrealistic vision of

political consensus making. The only criticism he receives comes in the form of questions

which he seems fully prepared to answer (17). While nearly every work by Sinclair can

be classified as didactic, and most fit the criteria established here for literary propaganda,

rarely do his works so heavily rely on redundancy to leave readers with a positive

impression of his worldview. The dialog of those assembled provides the clearest kind of

redundancy, speaking aloud their appreciation for the fictional candidate’s policy

proposal, but the text goes further, combining this with several other layers of

confirmation. The remainder of the text acts as a plot-level redundancy, confirming that

Sinclair’s plan, when implemented, does in fact prove to be a viable economic program for the State of California. In these moments, the novella seems difficult to classify as a work of literary propaganda as it subordinates aesthetic or narrative concerns in favor of

its persuasive efforts. Sinclair’s simple but effective prose style and the author’s

willingness to incorporate some amount of resistance to the EPIC plan, both in the

meeting and the subsequent campaign, prevent the work from entirely departing from the

realm of the literary. However, I, Governor of California, more than The Jungle or The

Millennium, comes close to devolving into a pure work of propaganda.

In subsequent chapters, readers see Sinclair’s campaign taking shape in a surprising level of detail. Rather than simply presenting his plan fully formed, Sinclair the author includes a fictional account of Sinclair the fictional candidate consulting a number of experts, including economists and lawyers, to confirm the viability of his plan.

As narrative, these sections seem to serve little purpose, but as rhetorical moves, they are significant. Sinclair enters the political field as an outsider, having little to no direct experience in creating public policy. His opponents often depicted him as an impractical dreamer offering only “Empty Promises In California” (Sinclair Candidate 172). The seemingly superfluous inclusion of Sinclair’s visits to various experts serves as a counter to this narrative about his candidacy, working to further build his ethos as a viable candidate for governor.

Having given the details of his plan’s implementation, the narrator’s attention turns to the party’s organizing and campaigning efforts. The first of these was the publication of a book that gave the details of the candidate’s plan, much like I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty itself.12 Sinclair the candidate claims that the

12 While the name of the book is not given, being referred to in the text simply as “The Book,” Sinclair put out a series of texts, most of which did not take narrative form. The book referenced here is most likely The EPIC Plan for California or Immediate EPIC, both of which were informational pamphlets that sought to explain EPIC’s goals in brief. 66

book can serve to answer any and all questions about his platform. He tells the press, “Do

not ask me to do anything more than this for the present…EPIC is enough for one year of

campaigning and for four years of any governor’s administration” (25). Having said all

that he meant to on the matter, Sinclair turns the day to day operations of campaigning to

local organizers who would spread his campaign message as outlined in “The Book,”

suggesting that his skills are limited only to writing, and that “the art of printing was a

later and more important invention than oratory, and a more effective way of spreading

ideas among six and one-half million people scattered over a hundred and fifty-eight

thousand square miles of land.” For Sinclair, the written word has displaced oratory as

the most effective means of political persuasion, therefore he resolves to make no

speeches and limit his personal interviews during the campaign. Fittingly, given the

subject of this chapter, Sinclair imagines that much of the in-person campaigning would be carried out by “propaganda groups” made up of “persons who had enough of poverty and wanted to end it” (Ibid.). Again we see that Sinclair does not deny his association with propaganda, but instead actively applies the term to the activities of his supporters.

Through their grassroots efforts, they will seek to propagate the candidate’s message. He does this with full knowledge of the connotations that come along with it. However, in this context, the distinction between Sinclair’s form of propaganda and the state form of propaganda is clearer than ever.

In contrast to the efforts of Sinclair’s propaganda groups, both real and fictional, his opponents offered an aggressive media campaign of their own, or in Sinclair’s own terms, a propaganda for their own position. It is precisely this kind of competing narrative

that audiences would be urged to seek out by Sinclair’s suggestion that his own campaign

materials constitute a form of propaganda. Positioning these materials, including I,

Governor itself, as propaganda not only makes the author/candidate seem open with his

intentions, but it also lays bare the motives of those marshalling different media forms

against him. The primary approach taken by Sinclair’s opponents in their attacks against

the candidate was to depict him as idealistic and impractical. Perhaps the most famous

image from the campaign came from a cartoon published in the Los Angeles Times. It

depicted Sinclair skipping through a field wearing nothing but a sash bearing his name.

His figure is drawn in an exaggerated style with a large nose and a manic grin as he

tosses petals from a bouquet labelled “promises” to his side. Behind him, a group of men, women, and children watch, all of whom are drawn in a more subdued, realistic style with stoic expressions on their faces. The title of the cartoon, “Doing the Light and Very

Fantastic,” makes the intended interpretation quite clear (Fig. 1). Upton Sinclair, candidate for governor, has little to offer the people of California of substance. He is an idealistic dreamer with nothing but “Empty Promises for California.” Many similar cartoons appeared in newspapers across the state. One depicts the author dressed in drag labelled “‘Topsy’ Sinclair, Star Eyed Goddess of California ‘EPIC’” (Fig. 2). Another shows him wearing a cardboard halo, chasing after Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini all on horseback while mounting a toy stick horse labelled “EPIC,” with a tag hanging off of it marked “Dictatorship for California” (Fig. 3). These critiques are similar to those that the

author predicts in his “true story of the future,” but the severity and frequency of the

attacks he faced were clearly greater than he had anticipated.13

In spite of these real and imagined complications, the primary season in the

novella proves to be a productive one for Sinclair the fictional candidate as people of all

classes quickly take up his cause (34). In the fictional account, all that was required to

gain this support was for Sinclair to make his positions known, to distribute his plan to

his supporters through his self-published book, and to answer an occasional question for

clarification. Sinclair’s victory barely registers in the novel, appearing only as a brief

paragraph while his speeches and policy explanations extend for pages. This serves two

purposes, making his win seem almost inevitable, and emphasizing Sinclair’s willingness

to simply go to work on the first day of his time in office rather than getting lost in pomp, circumstance, and the power that comes with the position. With much of the book dedicated to describing the plan itself and the few challenges that Sinclair and his supporters faced during the campaign, the portrayal of Sinclair’s time in office is relatively compressed. EPIC is implemented with only a brief setback in the form of a challenge to the plan’s constitutionality. The book’s final full chapter, titled “Victory,” assures readers the EPIC worked flawlessly. The narrator tells us, “The process of EPIC was like that of a swiftly flowing river eating into a sand bank. Private industry began to crumble; and as quickly as any productive enterprise failed, it was made over into a public institution. Nothing could withstand the current of co-operation” (59). Seeing this

13 These cartoons and the broader media campaign waged against Sinclair’s candidacy are the subject of another book by Sinclair with the self-deprecating title I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked. 69

success, those who once opposed the plan soon experience a kind of conversion, “The

opposition to EPIC began to collapse, with a suddenness which surprised everybody”

(60). Further, seeing the success of EPIC, the federal government begins to move toward

implementing EPIC’s proposals on a national scale (Ibid.). Seeing that he had completed

all he set out to accomplish, Sinclair elects not to seek another term and, “purposed to go

home and write a novel” (62).

What is remarkable about both I, Governor of California and How I Ended

Poverty and The Millennium is how both works treat an apocalyptic moment as one that

presents a legitimate opportunity for large scale structural change. Capitalism in the early

twentieth century appeared so entrenched, so powerful, and so unmoving that in 1907, it

appeared more likely that the world’s population would be reduced to a dozen people

than socio-economic upheaval taking place through organic, non-violent means. Two and

a half decades later, with the writing of I, Governor, Sinclair had witnessed the United

States undergoing what amounted to a far more mundane kind of apocalypse, one that in

fact he had been predicting for many years previously. In his non-fiction works such as

The Industrial Republic, The Way Out, and Letters to Judd, Sinclair warned his readers of

a coming economic collapse, arguing that the kind of economic growth and concentration

that early twentieth-century capitalism encouraged was simply unsustainable. With the crash of 1929, Sinclair saw an economic climate that he believed vindicated his predictions, and he saw a population in such dire conditions that they might be willing to consider adopting a radically different system of social organization as a result. With

Sinclair’s first speculative work, the author imagined capitalism continuing along the

70 same trajectory for almost a century, and developing even more exaggerated forms of its early twentieth century inequities. With I, Governor, the author’s vision for a new society was not so distant and required far less bloodshed. Perhaps inspired by his experiences in

Helicon Hall, Sinclair believed that he had lived in an ideal future society, a society founded on cooperation which did away with the vicissitudes of capitalism, and he believed that he could share that experience if not with the world, at least with the people of his home state.

I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty is just one more example of the author’s commitment to producing art that functions as propaganda, not seeking to manipulate his audience but to persuade them of the validity of his worldview and move them to action in support of it. However, more than in any other work before it, Sinclair is clear and direct with these intentions. Sinclair is especially explicit in his rhetoric as the book comes to an end. While his earlier works always carried with them an assumed slant toward the author’s well-known socialist perspective, Sinclair concludes his pamphlet- novella with a direct address to his readers, asking for their action and support, which is of course the goal of any propagandistic text. Where Sinclair’s earlier works were often unclear in the action they expected readers to take, beyond a nebulous acceptance of socialist principles, here the way forward is obvious. The plan outlined in the book, he argues, “is your way out, and there is no other way, and you will have to take it. I have given you my best in this book, and now it is up to you,” suggesting that voting for

Sinclair and other EPIC endorsed candidates is the reader’s best chance at ending poverty in the state (63). These lines constitute the author/candidate’s closing argument, stated as

a pure expression of deliberative rhetoric. Not only is this the best possible future, only

the reader may bring it about by supporting EPIC in the coming election. For the modern

reader, this appeal lacks the advantage of Kairos, or proper timing, but shortly after its

publication, the power of this call must have been notable.

Whether or not Sinclair’s plan would have worked if implemented is largely

irrelevant. What is far more significant is that the author in this work, and many of his

other late-career novels, sought to write a kind of fiction focused not only on persuading

readers to accept his worldview, but one that encouraged them to take specific actions

toward bringing about a more desirable future. In doing this, Sinclair risked criticism that

dismissed his works, as many have, as “more agitation than art”; however, to do so would

be a mistake. Sinclair the literary propagandist did not write works in order to dominate

readers, to suppress other sources of information, or even to convert the reading public en

masse. Instead, his works, and I, Governor of California in particular, were one source of

information among many, presented not as uncontestable facts but as fictional accounts of possible futures. Whether readers found Sinclair’s vision for a transformed California to be desirable, or even possible, or if they simply viewed it as another “Empty Promise in California” remained for them to decide.

Looking backward, it seems reasonable to dismiss Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial

campaign as a historical outlier, one attempt of many made by an eccentric author to

bring about an even greater social change than that he is said to have inspired with the

publication of The Jungle. However, before doing so, it is important to acknowledge two

things. First, Sinclair’s campaign was largely a successful one. After earning wide-spread

support in the primary, he presented a credible challenge to his Republican opponent in the general election. While his opponents attempted to portray him as an impractical dreamer, providing his followers with only “empty promises,” this was not the way the public understood him. Instead, both Sinclair as a candidate and his platform were seen as a credible, if only slightly less popular, alternative to the mainstream conservative policies of his opponent. Second, Sinclair was not unique in the political scene of the

1930s. In fact, the decade was marked by an uptick in unconventional candidates, populist appeals, and unconventional campaign strategies, at least a few of which took the form of speculative fiction.

Sinclair’s transition from author to politician took place alongside the rise to

national prominence of another significant populist: Huey Long, the Louisiana Governor,

Senator, and presidential candidate. Long made his name campaigning against the

corruption of the state government, which he alleged was under the thrall of business

interests, and on the creation of social programs which he argued would make, “Every

man a king, but no one wears a crown” (Williams 262). While in office, Long put in

place a significant number of social programs, but also had his ethics called into question,

eventually being removed from office on charges of misuse of state funds (333, 389).

After an eight-year career in Louisiana politics marked by this mix of success and controversy, both implementing bold government programs and earning a great deal of

enmity, Long made the move to the federal government after being elected to the United

States Senate in 1932. He served three years in Congress, and during that time came to be

at first an ally of Franklin Roosevelt during the initial implementation of New Deal

programs. However, the Louisiana Senator’s attitude toward Roosevelt changed as the

president’s programs proved to be far less radical than his own, which advocated for

large-scale wealth redistribution (7-8). In opposition to the New Deal, Long proposed his own “Share Our Wealth” program, a plan based on capping personal wealth and rewriting the tax code. The federal government would reinvest this “excess” wealth in public work projects, and provide every family in the country a basic income (693). While Long’s plan shares some similarities to Sinclair’s EPIC project, the Louisiana senator rejected the socialist label, instead arguing that his ideals were biblical in nature—an appeal that

Sinclair would himself turn to from time to time (694).

While the parallels between Sinclair and Long’s programs for radical wealth redistribution are notable, what is more immediately relevant is Long’s attempt to use fiction to build support for his campaign and Share Our Wealth. Leveraging his successful career in the Senate, Long announced in 1935 that would run for President of the United States on a platform that closely resembled the populist policies he had favored during his time in the Senate. Long’s campaign lasted only one month as the

Senator was assassinated shortly after announcing his run for office by the son-in-law of

one of his political opponents (865). While Long’s campaign had barely begun, his vision

for his time in office survived through a work of speculative fiction published

posthumously. Long’s book, My First Days in the White House, which he called his

“second autobiography,” detailed his actions upon being sworn into office. The novella,

like Sinclair’s, begins with a short preface that declares its significance, “This volume is

presented as a prophecy by its Author; the late Huey Pierce Long, who endeavored to

portray what he would have done had he become President.” Further, it makes clear that

the author’s intention is not to campaign for office, but that it is the product of “a desire

to present its readers a future America under the guidance of its Author” (1). Like

Sinclair’s work, it is quite brief, it was self-published, and even more than I, Governor of

California, it lacks some of the poetic qualities that we conventionally associate with

literary texts.

While both works take a similar form, tonally and in its rhetorical style, My First

Days in the White House is different from Sinclair’s campaign novella. Where Sinclair

begins his narrative from a place of uncertainty with the author expressing his reluctance

to take on the role of the politician, Long begins from a confident position. The book’s

first line, “It had happened. The people had endorsed my plan for the redistribution of

wealth and I was the President of the United States,” places Long’s victory in the past tense, assuming the support of the American voting public (3). Notably, Long writes in the first person where Sinclair chose to write his book in third. Long’s confidence is shown not just in where his story begins, but in how he frames it as well, “The great campaign which was destined to save America from Communism and Fascism was history. Other politicians had promised to re-make America; I had promised to sustain it”

(Ibid.). These statements are offered with little in the way of explanation, only to be affirmed later through the events of the novella. This kind of redundancy in which a grandiose statement about the candidate’s political destiny which is confirmed by the novella’s plot is precisely the kind of redundancy which Susan Suleiman condemned as a form of literary authoritarianism, foreclosing the reader’s ability to differ from the

narrator or author in their interpretation of events (10). This is especially troubling given

that Long’s description of how exactly Share Our Wealth would work is relatively

limited. Sinclair’s campaign novella functioned primarily to explain his platform, laying

out not only the goals of his campaign, but the specifics of how they would become law,

how they would be funded, and how other obstacles would be overcome. Long’s,

conversely, assumes that the voter would take much of his plan on faith.

Long’s presidential authority remains largely unchallenged until he brings Share

Our Wealth before Congress. A number of senators filibuster one aspect of the bill and a governor of an unnamed state expresses his intention to “resist by force if necessary” the portion of the program that would seize any income in excess of five million dollars.

Long convinces the governor to take the issue to the Supreme Court. This legal challenge proves to be an anemic one, as the court barely needs any time to deliberate before determining that the laws in question are in fact constitutional (55). With the final challenge to Long’s plan laid to rest, all that remains for Long to do is measure the

American people’s response to his program of wealth redistribution. For this reason,

Long plans to take a train trip across the country. Along the route, he is greeted by large crowds who he at first expects to be protesting, or expressing some kind of distress. He asks for the train to stop in front of one of the larger groups and asks them why they’ve gathered. Their response is simply a series of loud cheers, before one member of the crowd speaks the book’s final line: “Nothing! We have just found out how badly we

needed you for President all the time” (58).14 It is notable that the location of the crowd

and its composition are not given. Those assembled simply stand in for the American

people as a whole. In giving voice to a member of the group who explains the gathering

with a first person plural pronoun, Long includes the reader in those who have “just

found out how badly we needed you for President.” In doing so, he attempts to create an

impression not only that his ideas will be well received across the nation, but also

predispose the reader to accept them as well.

In the fictional account of Sinclair’s campaign, the candidate informs the press

that all the details they need about his platform can be found in “The Book.” He declines

to make speeches or give interviews as he understands his own skills to be confined to the

realm of the written word. Even as he conducts a political campaign, Sinclair presents

himself as a writer and novelist first (25). If I, Governor of California was an example of

an author straying away from his literary vocation in order to produce a more effective

work of political communication, My First Days in the White House can be understood as

a politician dabbling in something that resembles literature in order to more effectively

propagate his platform. Divorced from literary ambitions and seemingly constructed with

few scruples about the means of persuasion it employs, Long’s form of fictional

propaganda feels quite different in practice than Upton Sinclair’s. It is this form of

14 The book’s concluding line is followed by a brief appendix that lays out Long’s proposed “Share Our Wealth” program in a little more detail, explaining the exact limitations placed on how much income an individual may have and how the new tax code will work. It is notable, however, that this plan is not nearly as detailed as the one laid out by Sinclair. While it proposes a radical new social welfare program, it says very little about the specifics, suggesting that in practice, it would follow the novella’s format of leaving it to Congress and state governments to determine the exact amount of income provided to each citizen. 77

propaganda that critics have rightly expressed their disdain for in the past, not for its

artlessness, but for its seemingly manipulative nature.

While the aftermath of Sinclair’s campaign is well documented by both historians

and the author’s autobiographical writings, the abrupt end of Long’s presidential run

leaves us with no account of how a national audience would have received the candidate

or his campaign novella. However, there is a fictional narrative that both acts as a

response to Long’s rise to national prominence and imagines a version of his presidency:

Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here.15 While Long is never named

directly, contemporary reviewers and literary critics generally accepted the premise that

the novel’s central antagonist, Buzz Windrip, was based on Long (Perry 44-48). While

Lewis’s novel is not, like Long and Sinclair’s, a fictional extension of a political campaign, it is a speculative work that pictures the aftermath of the implementation of a sweeping program of reform carried out by a populist candidate. In this case, some aspects of that program of reform seem quite familiar. The novel begins in 1936 during election season. Buzz Windrip, a United States Senator running for President, attracts a large following due to several unconventional policy positions (74). Windrip wins the support of many of his followers by promising a basic income to every citizen of the country, a policy that many voters find appealing despite other troubling aspects of his campaign. In addition to his wealth redistribution plan, Windrip campaigns on promises to prevent non-Christians from holding public office, increase funding to the military, and

15 In addition to the similarities in their names and literary styles, Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis were close acquaintances, maintaining a correspondence until Lewis’s death in 1951. Lewis was among the initial group of volunteers who lived in Helicon Hall, serving as the colony’s janitor (Jensen viii). 78

severely restrict the rights of African Americans. The final point of Windrip’s platform

calls for the passage of Constitutional amendments granting him emergency powers

including the ability to create laws without congressional approval and that are not

subject to review by the Supreme Court (74-77).16 The novel’s protagonist, Doremus

Jessup and his wife react to Windrip’s plan with surprise and confusion. They are alarmed that such a plan could garner significant support. Dormeus reminds his wife that there are many voters who easily get “caught up in the web of propaganda,” who will “be convinced that, even if our Buzzy maybe has got a few faults, he’s on the side of the plain people…and they’ll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator” (81). From early on in the novel, Lewis foregrounds the dangers of effective propaganda when deployed by a politician such as Windrip. While the Windrips and their friends, a group of upper-middle

class moderates, may see through the candidate, Windrip poses a legitimate danger to the

“plain people,” who are, at least in Jessup’s estimation, more easily manipulated. At least

within the storyworld, this appears to be the case. In the months that follow, Windrip’s

base of supporters grows exponentially around the country.

Windrip’s campaign culminates in a large rally held at Madison Square Garden.

Determined to learn more about the candidate in spite of his skepticism, Jessup resolves

to attend (109). The rally itself proves to be rather conventional: a combination of

16 Biographers such as T. Harry Williams have depicted Long as a moderate on racial issues, making the association between Long and Windrip somewhat more tenuous. Windrip’s focus on racial and religious minorities brings his platform more closely in line with conventional understandings of fascism. Among the characteristics of “Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco included “fear of difference” and “selective populism,” both of which are key to Windrip’s rise to power. While this may at first make the association between Windrip and Long seem less direct, more recently, historians including Glen Jeansonne have argued that Long’s views on race were far from progressive. Jeansonne suggests that Long’s prejudice remained unexpressed simply because it had not proven politically advantageous to make it known publically (266). 79 speeches and patriotic music to stir the crowd. However, the event is framed by shocking acts of violence. On the way to the rally, Jessup witnesses members of Windrip’s private army, The Minute Men, assaulting an elderly man for shouting “To hell with Buzz! Three cheers for F.D.R.!” Soon afterward, a group of Minute Men provoke a group of

Communist protestors into a fight which ends when a police riot squad arrives to arrest the Communists (114). In spite of this violence, Jessup not only attends the rally, but finds himself taken in by Windrip’s oration. The candidate’s mannerisms appear awkward at first, matched by his monotonous delivery as he tells the crowd how out of place he felt on first visiting New York, ultimately confessing, “And tonight, friends, I’m pretty near as scared of Old Gotham as I was then!” (118). The response to Windrip’s

“weary humility” is tepid to such a degree that Jessup questions the candidate’s viability.

Soon, however, Windrip transitions into “a rhapsody of general ideas” and “noble but slippery abstractions” that at first bore the audience, but eventually leave them “absorbed and excited” (119). As Windrip promises to “smash the Jew financiers,” “crooked labor- leaders,” and “sneaking spies of Moscow,” even Jessup finds himself taken in. He leaves the meetings not only thinking that Windrip is a “darn good sort when you come to meet him” but that the Minute Men are “nice, clean-cut young fellows” in spite of the violence he witnessed. More remarkably, Jessup finds himself unable to remember many specifics about the candidate’s speech, only his faint, positive impressions of the experience (120-

1). Unlike Sinclair’s depiction of political rhetoric, which relied on relaying speeches in their entirety, Lewis focalizes the rally through Jessup, allowing only brief glimpses of the candidate’s persuasive approach. However, from the fleeting nature of Jessup’s

80 memory, it seems most likely that Windrip’s charms served to prop up an appeal that lacked a significant degree of substance.

After the election, which Windrip wins comfortably, the new regime moves swiftly to enact change. While Long imagined a nation that would swiftly and enthusiastically embrace his program of reform, Lewis imagines a much more disturbing turn of events. After taking the oath of office and moving into the White House, Windrip orders that The Minute Men be recognized as a branch of the armed forces, answering only to the President himself. Next, he commands Congress to grant him the emergency powers he outlined during his campaign. When they resist, Windrip declares martial law and has over a hundred Congressmen arrested. The remaining Senators and

Representatives reconvene, flanked by squads of minutemen, and grant Windrip emergency powers for the duration of “the crisis” (162-5). In the days that follow, the federal government as it existed early twentieth century ceases to be while Windrip consolidates power through force and the suppression of dissent (166). Windrip’s rise to power has more in common with that of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, but the parallels to Long’s proposed policies are striking. It suggests not only the potential for fascism to be masked with populist appeals, but also raises numerous, possibly unfounded, questions about Long’s motives.

It Can’t Happen Here functions as an example of a critical dystopia. While this genre was well established by the 1930s, Lewis’s novel is notable for the way it uses a dystopian narrative to imagine the ramifications of the growing support for a populist social policy when coupled with authoritarian tendencies. Its picture of a nation

81 transformed appeals to the reader’s desire for political stability, demonstrating that a politician such Windrip who promises radical reforms may also be unpredictable after taking office. The seemingly desirable change promised could be coupled with unforeseen consequences. In presenting its readers with this possible future, it makes a fictional argument about the danger of supporting charismatic populist candidates, even if some of their policies seem appealing in the abstract. It Can’t Happen Here serves as a useful reminder of how propaganda was used and perceived in the early twentieth century. Its villain is a despot brought into power by a powerful propaganda machine that convinces the American voting public that empowering him is in their best interest.

However, it makes this argument through a novel that is itself a form of literary propaganda, simultaneously taking part in political persuasion while expressing concerns about dangers of persuasive media. The difference between the kind of propaganda Lewis depicts in the novel and the novel itself should be clear. Where Windrip’s speech urges his followers to take violent action against dissenters, Lewis’s narration suggests that the reader critically engage with political discourse. Where Windrip promises rash action as soon as he enters office, Lewis advocates for caution. Where Windrip speaks with certainty, Lewis promotes skepticism. The contrast between Windrip’s insidious propaganda and Lewis’s attempt at literary persuasion demonstrates the wide range of texts that fall under the blanket category of “propaganda.” Further, the possible future that Lewis depicts serves as a reminder that propaganda in many forms is a part of political discourse in the United States. This suggests that there is practical value in

82 carefully studying propaganda in order to recognize and engage with it in the public sphere.

Upton Sinclair’s assertion that all art is “universally and inescapably propaganda” may at first seem extreme (9). However, in the context of the political discourse of the early twentieth century, it seems like a much more defensible claim. However, the appearance of propaganda in the political mainstream should come as no surprise given that the term is most commonly applied to state-affiliated media. Subsequently, the fact that politicians such as Long recognized the usefulness of narrative for political consensus making is only to be expected. However, state engagement with propaganda is not limited to the creation of persuasive media. It can also take the form of positioning itself in relation to existing creative works. In doing so, the state’s actions make these works of art a party to propaganda efforts even if they were not deliberately designed to do so. On May 10th, 1933, the German government led by the Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment organized an event described as a “book burning festival.”

Accounts of the event varied, suggesting that either hundreds or tens of thousands of books were set ablaze (“Book Bonfire” 14). Works by a number of American authors,

Upton Sinclair among them, were prominent on the list of subversive works set to be destroyed. The American response to the event was relatively muted; however, one prominent public reaction came from Walter Lippmann in an editorial for the New York

Herald Tribune. For Lippmann, the destruction of books in Germany was a “highly symbolic” gesture. Lippmann notes that the books destroyed were not simply those by

Communists or those critical of the government. Instead, books such as Remarque’s All

Quiet on the Western Front were also added to the bonfires, seemingly for their depiction

of the “pitiable sacrifice of mankind in war” (Ibid.). Lippmann suggests that the

destruction of works merely because they take a critical stance toward war and violence

signaled the government’s attempt to prepare their citizens for war (14-15). Throughout his career, Lipmann stressed the role that media plays in creating impressions of public policy and shaping public opinion. The suppression of particular perspectives, voices, and ideas is one of the most visible and egregious cases of how art and literature can be used as tools to persuade audiences, in this case by removing unwanted voices from the public sphere.

Unsurprisingly, The United States responded to this event a number of years later as a part of their own propaganda efforts after entering the Second World War. On April

17th, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt declared a new national holiday: Victory Book Day. In a statement explaining the decision Roosevelt praised the resilience of books and the ideas that they contain, “We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire…No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons” (qtd. in Manning 48). While Roosevelt frames war effort not as a conflict between several sovereign nations but as a moralistic “fight against tyranny,” he is surprisingly open about his motivations, that the holiday’s creation is a part of a propaganda effort. Roosevelt’s comments are significant because they do not simply suggest that government or individuals may craft creative works intended to operate as propaganda. Instead, in the context of war, any and all books may become a kind of

intellectual or ideological weapon. This use is not confined only to those works like

Sinclair’s that are “deliberately” propaganda. Instead, books of any kind have within

them the potential for persuasive use. Roosevelt’s claim that “in this war, we know,

books are weapons” was soon adopted by the Office of Wartime Information, simplified

to the slogan “books are weapons in the war of idea.” The phrase would be used on

propaganda posters, often in support of organizations including the Council on Books in

Wartime which distributed “Armed Services Editions” of popular novels to soldiers and

service members deployed overseas (Appelbaum 4). The willingness of the United States

government to not only acknowledge the persuasive power of books but to marshal it as a

part of the war effort serves as a useful reminder of the medium’s potential for use as

propaganda. Propagandistic literature may never attain the degree of aesthetic esteem

afforded to other kinds of imaginative writing, but that does not mean that it should be

left out of accounts of literary history or be exempt from extended analysis. If books continue to operate as weapons and are consistently wielded by individuals and governments across the world in a variety of ideological struggles, it is imperative that we come to understand them more clearly.

Figure 1 “Doing the Light and Very Fantastic,” Los Angeles Times

Figure 2 “California Epicklement,” San Francisco News

Figure 3 “The Fourth Horseman!,” Los Angeles Examiner

Chapter 3. Coming of Age and Ethics in Wright and Fauset

I. The Moral of the Story

In his 1949 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin offered a searing

critique of one of the most famous didactic novels in literary history, Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Put simply, Baldwin asserts that the book is, “a very bad

novel” for its simplicity and sentimentality. For Baldwin, this sentimentally reads as

fundamentally dishonest, a mark of an, “inability to feel” present in both the book and its

author. Further he suggests that, “the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to

experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret

and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty” (14). These claims are broad; however,

Baldwin continues with a more direct critique of Stowe’s work. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin—

like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence.” However, this violence is of an “unmotivated” and “senseless” nature (.ibid). Presenting the violence of slavery in this manner, then, is a failure as it, “[leaves] unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds” (.ibid). While Baldwin blames this inattention to the motivations for cruelty and violence in part on Stowe’s inability as a writer, he also suggests that a simplistic moral perspective is at play in her work. He claims that the book is, “activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in 89

this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from the spirit of medieval times

which sought to exorcise evil by burning witches; and is no different from that terror

which activates a lynch mob” (18). Stowe, then, is not interested in demonstrating the

causes of evil or immoral behavior as much as distancing herself and her readers from it.

Baldwin cites this readerly reaction, saying that, “We receive a very definite thrill of

virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all” (19). It is ultimately this effect

that is the most damning indictment of moralistic protest fiction: the suggestion that it

does not seek to either understand the motivations for the horrors it catalogs or even to

change future behavior. Instead, it merely provides solace for the reader, assuring them

that they are not a part of the problem at hand.

Significantly, Baldwin’s issue is not with Stowe alone. While the majority of

Baldwin’s essay focuses on the shortcomings of Stowe’s work and its imitators, he notes

the similarities in the moral stance of works such as Richard Wright’s novel Native Son.

Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Native Son is a “catalogue of violence,” in Baldwin’s

estimation (14). Not only the violence that Bigger experiences, but that he enacts himself

in response. Provocatively, Baldwin poses that:

Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendent, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle.” (22)

Baldwin’s closing statement on the novel is a poetic one that leaves his ultimate critique of Wright’s fiction open to interpretation: “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that

90 it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended” (23).

However, if we return to Baldwin’s earlier critique of Stowe, the parallels between Uncle

Tom and Native Son become somewhat clearer.

Perhaps the greatest sin of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Baldwin’s estimation is one of function: it allows a reader to mark slavery specifically and racism more generally as

“perfectly horrible” acts. In doing so, the reader distances themselves from these acts without having to do much of anything to combat their material influence on the world.

Certain readers may treat Native Son the same way. They can read the account of the violence experienced by Bigger and perhaps come to understand his actions in its context.

In doing so, they can assure themselves that they understand the structural racism underpinning these events to be “perfectly horrible” while continuing to live within a political and economic system that is based upon and supported by white supremacy (13).

In this way, both novels serve a similar function for their readers, and as instruments for enacting social change, they perhaps similarly fall short. For Baldwin, then, the failure is twofold: these works both oversimplify the systems they are representing and actually serve to dull the reader’s desire to take action on the injustices depicted (or at the very least, lessen their feeling of complicity in the events depicted).

Baldwin’s critique of the protest novel is useful for this project, focused on the instructional role of literature, as it points to the pedagogical shortcomings of a particular kind of moralistic fiction. When we think of morals or ethics in fiction, perhaps the first association we make is to the simplistic moral of the story: some seemingly universal aphorism that the reader is presented with at the conclusion of a novel or short story. In a

discipline that prizes complexity and ambiguity while shunning all things reductive, this

kind of association carries with it some consequences. As a result, discussing morality

and ethics in literature is most often done with great care. In the introduction of The

Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne Booth carefully navigates this issue,

both reminding his reader that morality is only one small part of his proposed style of

ethical reading and noting the faults of past approaches to literary morality: “Too often in

the past, ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ critics have assumed that their only responsibility was to

label a given narrative or kind of narrative as in itself harmful or beneficial—often

dismissing entire forms or genres, such as the ‘the novel,’ in one grand indictment” (9).

While there have been many literary historians seeking to understand literature that

serves a pedagogical function in the past, their work has tended to contain a similar

anxiety that embracing the didactic function of literature would require sacrificing some

degree of complexity. In spite of these anxieties, and perhaps because of them, it only

seems more important to include as a part of this study of the didactic literature of the

early twentieth century works that seek to provide their readers with a kind of moral

education.17

17 The focus of this project as a whole is on didactic literature. Earlier in this project, I borrow Northrop Frye's definition of the term: "literature intended primarily for instruction or containing an important moralistic element." This chapter will focus on a subset of that same body of literature, that which "[contains] an important moralistic element," which I am calling for the purposes of this project "morally didactic literature." This category is a rather broad one as I include within it any didactic work that focuses its instructional elements on morality or ethics. Subsequently, in discussing this body of literary works, the didactic function is likely to vary widely between individual examples and occasionally even within the same work itself. As such, a work may be morally didactic for focusing on the "teaching" of a straightforward moral lesson, or it may focus on wrestling with a more complex and ambiguous ethical issue. The task of the critic in the method I am suggesting in this book is not only to note that a work displays qualities of didactic qualities, but to lay out the unique and specific ways that it engages in didacticism. That is what I will be attempting to do in this chapter. 92

Notably, Baldwin does not only discuss moralistic protest fiction in negative terms. Instead, he suggests a better way forward for this kind of writing. While Stowe and

Wright’s works fall short in terms of their moral imagination, Baldwin expresses a hope that future works might, “discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth” (15).

Something closer to truth, it seems, corresponds with a greater degree of complexity and an understanding of the motivations behind injustice. With these added layers, perhaps a work could better be able to represent and subsequently help readers understand morality in depth. It is my purpose in this chapter to demonstrate how some morally didactic works can achieve Baldwin’s goal of “revealing something a little closer to the truth” by examining another work by Richard Wright and a work by one of his contemporaries,

Jessie Fauset. At first glance, these works may appear to be simple continuations of the protest novel tradition. However, both Wright and Fauset use reflexive techniques including asides and narration, and this is what separates them from the failings of the protest novel. Instead of simply presenting a string of injustices for readers to empathize with (and allowing them to feel less complicit as a result), these techniques model a thoughtful approach to ethics that suggests that both character and reader should be constantly thinking about and recalibrating their sense of morality. In doing so, they make a strong case for the power that storytelling holds for providing a moral education.

My focus in this chapter centers on novels of the Harlem Renaissance. One reason for this is that this era is a particularly rich one for the exploration of didacticism in

literature, especially when concerning ethical issues.18 At this specific historical

moment, a pattern emerges in literature that not only focuses on moral or ethical issues—

with works seeming to consider the ever-persistent question of, “how should one live?”—

but uses the form of the coming of age story to explore a particular kind of ethical

question: how should one live as a part of an oppressed group in a society that affords

one few opportunities to change the dynamics leading to one’s oppression? Further, these

works employ techniques of reflexive narration and non-diegetic asides to reinforce their

ethical “lessons,” practicing narrative redundancy for increased didactic effect.

Before we begin, it is essential to resolve three interrelated methodological

problems: first, we must define our working definition of ethics. Second, we must

consider the role that ethics has conventionally played in African American literature and

literature more generally. Finally, we must understand how the Bildungsroman has

conventionally operated in African American literature. Of these problems, the first is perhaps the most daunting, as the meaning and function of ethics has been debated extensively for millennia. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I am going to defer to one of the most prominent voices in the conversation surrounding ethics and literature,

Martha Nussbaum. In her 1986 treatise on ethics and luck, Nussbaum roughly explained the field of ethics as the study of how one can “live the life that is best and most valuable for a human being” (4). She explains in a footnote that for the purposes of her work, she chooses to forego the Kantian distinction between moral and non-moral value as she is

18 As Houston Baker has stated, movements are not consciously created by artists, but categories created retrospectively. Specifically, he noted that there was no Harlem Renaissance until “after the event” (xvii). While this is true, I use the term here as a shorthand for a specific grouping of works of African American literature of the early 20th century. 94

working from Greek texts which pose the question of ethics simply as, “how should we

live?” All values, in this school of thought, are extensions of the general concept of good life, which is the root of ethics for both the Greeks and for Nussbaum as well (5). For simplicity’s sake, I will follow her approach in this chapter.

The role that ethics should or should not play in literature has been a topic of

debate for some time. Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, and Richard Posner’s literary critical

feud of the 1990s is the most prominent, but hardly the only example of this still

unsolved dispute. In a recent review of the arguments made during this debate, Simon

Stow summarized the two key issues at play, “first, whether or not it is ever appropriate to judge a literary work on ethical grounds; and second, whether or not reading particular novels will make one a better citizen of a democratic polity” (186). For Booth, novels allow readers to associate with ethical characters through a process he calls conduction, and in conversation with others, readers can come to determine whether individual books are ethical or not. In contrast, Posner sees reading as a private practice that should be aesthetically focused. In the opening lines of his anti-ethical polemic, “Against Ethical

Criticism,” he cites Oscar Wilde, asserting that, “there is no such thing as a moral or an

immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all” (1). Nussbaum falls

closer to Booth in the debate, suggesting that novels can be useful for political and ethical

discourse, but only when used to drive conversation between individual readers about

political and ethical issues. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the debate was never settled in any

kind of formal way, but critics and philosophers have since provided some useful

assessments of the discourse between Posner, Booth, and Nussbaum. In particular, Simon

Stow, citing the work of Alasdair MacIntyre on moral argumentation, has noted that a

lack of shared assumptions between Posner, Booth, and Nussbaum, particularly on the

topic of the politicization of art stunts any potential for productive argumentation, with

each participant falling back on an “assertion and counter-assertion” debate style instead

(188-9). It is notable that Booth considers the role of ethics in literature to be a relatively minor one. Ethical reading in his estimation is a primarily readerly activity in which readers come to understand their moral priorities through a process of identification. The focus here is not on overt moral didacticism, in which an author imposes an ethical viewpoint on their audience. Instead, it is a passive process of reflection and self-

reflexivity. Booth’s work lays an important foundation for being one of the most visible

advocates of literature as a tool for ethical understanding, a very specific kind of

“equipment for living.” However, the focus of this chapter is not on the ability of a reader

to gain moral insight from a work not specifically designed to provide moral instruction,

but instead on works with a more clear-cut moral instructional function.

To better understand work with both a moral and didactic purpose, Colin

McGinn’s research on literature and ethics provides some essential context. McGinn

notes that there are two dominant modes of ethical instruction in literature: the

commandment and the parable (171-2). In the first, ethical instructions are made clearly and with little concrete context. Writers present their readers with a set of instructions on how to live in clear, simple terms. More often overlooked, however, is the parable, in which a moral lesson is explored through story. This, McGinn argues, makes the lesson a far more powerful one, as “it needs to be interpreted, not merely memorized word for

word. The material must be mentally processed and digested” (172). Further, he suggests

that narrativizing moral instructions is a process that is in line with how the human moral

faculty tends to operate. Even more significantly, he argues that the parable style of moral

instruction leads to a greater degree of complexity when considering ethical issues rather

than simplification. While both moral philosophers and critics of didactic literature fret over the use of narrative for instructional purposes, McGinn suggests that putting a moral situation on context through narrative.19 As readers of morally didactic literature, “we

can put an ethical idea through its paces, testing its ability to command our assent. We

can also explore its alignments, limitations, repercussions. We can face moral reality in

all its complexity and drama” (176). McGinn’s research builds on the foundation of the

work of ethical literary critics such as Booth, suggesting that not only might readers form

their own moral judgments through affiliations with fictional characters, but that narrative

might be one of the best possible mediums for providing moral instruction after all. This

new appreciation of the utility of moral fiction can help to illuminate the didactic function

of both genres we currently understand to be moralistic, as well as those we tend to

overlook.

This is not to suggest that McGinn is the first to discuss literature as a means of

providing moral education. In the American literary tradition, authors of some of the

19 McGinn’s struggles with the norms of his own field mirror my own to some extent, writing that, “Certainly, we should not neglect important ethical questions simply because their pursuit will not look much like some chosen paradigm of the rigorous—say, physics or logic or linguistics or historical scholarship. In this book I have been guided mainly by what strikes me as interesting, without worrying too much about how to relate what I have to say to orthodox analytical ethics” (6). I have attempted to follow a similar path in this project, which has led to some amount of complications as my own approach may not “look much like some chosen paradigm of the rigorous.” 97

earliest fictional texts, such as seduction novels, composed their works with the

intention—often stated in the prefaces of their works—of instructing their readers on how

to live a “good life.” These works, and other conduct books like them, offered instruction

and entertainment mingled together.20 In addition to conduct literature, other genres

engage in a kind of ethical didacticism. One in particular, the Bildungsroman, will be a

particular focus of this chapter. In a general sense, Mikhel Bakhtin described the

Bildungsroman as thematizing, “the image of man in the process of becoming,” or

described it more generally as “the novel of human emergence (qtd. in Bubíková 7).

More concretely, Jerome Hamilton Buckley describes it as the, “novel of all-around

development or self-culture” with “a more or less conscious attempt on the part of the

hero to integrate his powers, to cultivate himself by his experience” (13). In its earliest

forms, critics have connected the Bildungsroman and its protagonist to moral allegories

and conduct books, as it is often focused on the development of manners and integration

into polite society (Buckley 13, 20-21). As a result, the Bildungsroman has developed a

reputation as a relatively conservative genre, focused not on resisting structural systems

of power and oppression, but instead educating readers and characters alike on how to

better support or benefit from these systems (LeSeur 1).21 While this may be true of

20 It would be fair to ask whether or not conduct books engage in ethical didacticism, the teaching of ethics through fiction, or if they instead focus on other tasks such as teaching readers how to socially advance or integrate themselves better into society. Given the broad definition of the field of ethics offered by Nussbaum, I am inclined to consider these works to provide ethical instruction in that they offer advice on how to live a “good life” from a particular perspective. 21 This assertion of the conservatism of the Bildungsroman is common to works discussing both the Bildungsroman itself, such as Jerome Buckley’s The Season of Youth, and works focused on the African American or ethnic variations on the genre. Geta LeSeur makes a similar assertion in her study of the Black Bildungsroman, Ten is the Age of Darkness, as does Martin Japtok in his collection on the ethnic Bildungsroman, Growing Up Ethnic. 98

many Bildungsromans, especially those following the Horatio Alger model which

focuses on “rags-to-riches” financial success, numerous sub-genres have emerged from

the coming of age story that do not hold to this uniformly non-subversive format.

Among these sub-genres, the most pertinent to this chapter are the coming-of-age stories written by authors of marginalized ethnic and racial groups. Robert Stepto has argued that

African American literature is, “dominated by autobiographical and Bildungsroman impulses” (qtd. in Japtok 147). However, in spite of these impulses, the conventional

Bildungsroman, as critics such as Sondra O’Neale have suggested, presents a problem for non-white authors experiencing systemic discrimination, as a key element of the conventional Bildungsroman is a sublimation of the younger self and an affirmation of the established order (26). Perhaps in response to this narrative pattern, both writers and critics have found an alternative in the sub-genre most often called the Ethnic

Bildungsroman. The Ethnic Bildungsroman is described generally as a coming of age story featuring a protagonist from a group that is marginalized in the society of its origins. More specifically, Bonnie Hoover Braendlin argues that this sub-genre depicts,

“the particular identity and adjustment problems of people whose sex or color renders them unacceptable” and a, “struggle for individuation and a part in the American dream, which society simultaneously offers and denies them” (qtd. in Bubíková 17). The Ethnic

Bildungsroman, then, is a coming-of-age story as well as the story of a character coming into knowledge about their position in a society that views them as lesser. Narrating that process of education, I would argue, is a powerful didactic tool.

While the Bildungsroman is generally understood to be a novel of education, it is most often thought that the recipient of that education is its protagonist. It is certainly the case that the protagonists of these novels learn and undergo change, but it is important to not overlook the occasionally intended impact that they can have on their readers. In the introduction to the complete edition of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger noted that while his works, “may prove interesting stories,” he also hoped that, “they may also have the effect of enlisting the sympathies of his readers in behalf of the unfortunate children whose life is described, and of leading them to co-operate with the praiseworthy efforts now making by the Children's Aid Society,” expressing a desire to inform his reader and subsequently move them to action (2). With this in mind, it is worth noting that both character and reader may learn as a result of the story of a Bildungsroman, and as a result, it can be understood as a didactic genre. While this is clearer for the Alger-style story that demonstrates how a young person may find personal success through hard work and determination, I will argue in this chapter that the same kind of didactic process occurs for the reader of the Ethnic Bildungsroman, but with different ideas and “lessons” emphasized.

Given the tendency that Stepto noticed in African American letters toward

Bildungsroman impulses, and given the educational foundation of the Bildungsroman, it would seem to follow that African American literary criticism would feature a considerable amount of attention to the intersection of morality, didacticism, and this genre. However, that has not been the case. In fact, there has been very little criticism of

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African American literature that takes up the topic of ethics directly at all.22 This is

especially surprising as some of the foundational works in African American letters begin

from an ethical perspective. In the narrative of his life, Frederick Douglass invokes ethics

and morality when discussing abolition. African Americans showing that they are capable

of, “behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings,” would make the strongest

case possible against slavery (81). Similarly, DuBois offers extended commentary on

divergent ethical perspectives in African American politics in The Souls of Black Folks,

suggesting that, “To-day the two groups of Negroes, the one in the North, the other in the

South, represent these divergent ethical tendencies, the first tending toward radicalism,

the other toward hypocritical compromise” (203). With these kinds of foundational works

at least dabbling in ethical discourse, it would seem likely that much of the scholarship in

the field of African American literature would be rooted in ethical thought or would

practice a kind of ethical criticism. This, however, is far from the case. A cursory search

of recent publications in African American literary criticism finds a handful of works that

discuss ethics or morality in African American fiction, but far less than one might expect.

Erica Ball’s research examines conduct literature written for free black men in the 19th

Century, focused on their moral character (61-2). Similarly, Mimi Gisolfi D’Aponte has

written about the preponderance of morality plays in the tradition of African American

theatre (101). Few critics, however, seem interested in reading works of African

American fiction for their ethical content. A rare example of this is Lucille Fultz who

22 Some readers may note that this claim appears to be in conflict with Stepto’s suggestion that African American literature is dominated by didactic impulses. This, however, would assume that didacticism and moral didacticism are interchangeable. Much like a square is a rectangle but the reverse is not true, moral didacticism is a subset of didacticism. However, not all didacticism in literature is of a moral nature. 101

writes about how Toni Morrison’s novels serve as an outline of a “Black ethic,” or a

series of principles on how African Americans can live a version of a “good life” in the

face of systems of power and oppression that seem insurmountable.

Why, then, might contemporary critics of African American literature only rarely

approach their chosen texts from an ethical perspective? I would like to suggest that

Stow’s theory concerning a lack of shared assumptions about ethics and morality is key

to understanding this question. In our post-postmodern moment, a time of unstable truth,

and alternative facts, examining literature, or really any piece of cultural production, from

an ethical perspective seems like a difficult proposition. As a result, we frequently see

works that deal with ethically charged issues including racism, slavery, and bigotry of all

kinds, discussed in a manner that attempts to forego ethical terms entirely. After all, if we

cannot, as a society or even as a discipline, determine what constitutes living a good life,

raising the topic in the context of literary criticism seems like introducing an unnecessary

complication to an already complex task. However, this does not mean that all literary

critics and philosophers have chosen to leave this approach behind.

Philosopher Tommie Shelby has written on what he calls, “philosophical fiction,”

or works of literature that narrativize philosophical discourse.23 In particular, he has

focused on Richard Wright’s short fiction and how it espouses an ethical system that

Shelby calls the “ethics of the oppressed.” By this, Shelby means a rough set of standards

on how one can live within and attempt to resist an unjust social system. Shelby builds

23 Shelby is not the first to read Wright’s work as a kind of “philosophical fiction.” For an alternative perspective, see Steven J. Ruben’s “The Early Short Fiction of Richard Wright Reconsidered.” Ruben notably differs from Shelby by focusing on the metaphysical issues at play in Wright’s work, and particularly aligns him with existential thinking. 102

his case for an ethical reading of Wright’s work based on identifying common threads and elements of each story related to how characters of color respond to systemic forces of oppression. While his reading is persuasive and effective, however, I would like to argue that Shelby’s scope is far too modest, and that the ethics of the oppressed emerge as a motif not only in Wright’s short fiction, but throughout the author’s body of work, and in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance more generally. Subsequently, ethical criticism, and specifically ethical criticism through the lens of Shelby’s ethics of the oppressed proves to be a powerful tool for understanding works by African-American authors in this historical moment.

Given the long history of the field of ethics, it would be fair to ask why Shelby’s

work is the focus of this chapter rather than another ethical framework. The first, and

most significant reason is that Shelby’s work is grounded in the field of normative ethics

rather than metaethics. The distinction between the two fields, as explained by Colin

McGinn is that metaethics deals with ethical questions in purely abstract terms while

normative ethics seeks to apply ethical concepts to lived experience. McGinn further

argues that the trend in philosophical discussions of ethics toward a normative approach

is a natural consequence of what he calls the, “the human ethical sensibility,” which he

suggests, “works best when dealing with particular persons in specific contexts; abstract

generalities are not the natural modus operandi of the moral sense” (3). For our purposes

in this chapter, though we are dealing primarily with fictional and fictionalized works, the

ethical questions we will consider will be tied to a particular time and place: The United

States of America during the early twentieth century. Second, I am focusing on Shelby’s

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work on this chapter for its specificity. Philosophers such as Lawrence Blum and Ann

Cudd have produced highly detailed works on concepts such as solidarity and oppression,

both of which are pertinent to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Shelby’s

framework is specific to racial oppression and solidarity in the American context, making

it a far more useful critical tool.

In order to understand how the ethics of the oppressed emerge from the context of

the Harlem Renaissance, it will be necessary to consider Shelby’s ethical framework in

detail. He begins with a general discussion of ethics, which he explains as an attempt to

answer the fundamental question, “how should one live?” Of course, providing this

answer is never simple, especially due to an essential division in approaches to moral

philosophy: some pursue an “ideal” theory, in which ethicists consider how to best live

under simplified and generalized circumstances, while others develop a “nonideal”

theory, in which ethicists attempt to take into account a variety of social and political

factors which might be described as “suboptimal.” Shelby’s approach favors the non-

ideal. More specifically, he states, “The question within nonideal theory that I want to take up is how one should live under conditions of serious societal injustice. I am particularly concerned to understand how members of oppressed groups ought to live when the prospects for overcoming their oppression are uncertain or dim” (513).

Depending on conditions, Shelby suggests that the appropriate ethical response might differ greatly. This ethical approach leads to, “two types of imperatives. On the one hand, there are life choices one should make when it appears possible to end, mitigate, or evade

the injustices one faces; and then there are life choices one should make when freedom or

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even relief seems unattainable.” Put more succinctly, Shelby suggests that, “there is an

ethic of resistance aimed at liberating the oppressed from injustice and an ethic of

resistance aimed at living with dignity despite insurmountable injustice” (514). Shelby

suggests that he and Wright are both investigating the same question, one through

philosophical research and the other through fiction. Though Shelby suggests that

Wright’s work is philosophical, he seems to stop short of emphasizing its persuasive

function. It is only indirectly that the work seems to suggest the utility of rejecting the

“ethics of fear” imposed by Jim Crow America in favor of a resistant “ethics of the

oppressed.” This semantic concern leaves us with a particularly important question: what

are these ethics exactly? Following the “commandment” format of ethical instruction,

Shelby summarizes them as two positive and negative imperatives:

There are at least two broad imperatives for members of oppressed groups that can be discerned in Uncle Tom’s Children: seek solidarity with others similarly oppressed and maintain your self-respect. Corresponding to these two virtues are two vices: disloyalty and servility. Wright is particularly concerned to highlight how undignified, and sometimes blameworthy, it is to be disloyal to the other members of one’s oppressed group and to be servile in the face of oppression. (518)

These ethical standards are roughly elucidated over the course of Uncle Tom’s Children.

However, it is my goal in this chapter to demonstrate how these ethical principles are central to other works of the Harlem Renaissance, and how they form an undercurrent of moral didacticism of the art of that particular historical moment.

II. The Ethics of Living Jim Crow

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While Shelby argues that Uncle Tom’s Children suggests these ethical standards

through its interconnected narratives, he does not seem to see the book as an example of

morally didactic fiction. While moral problems are explored throughout the collection,

the diversity of characters and experiences presented as a part of Uncle Tom’s Children

make it difficult for the reader to take away a clear set of moral imperatives.24 In contrast,

I will demonstrate that Black Boy continues this same project of writing philosophical

fiction, but in a much more direct and focused manner, incorporating aesthetic choices

that signal a didactic orientation.25

The book opens, unsurprisingly, in Richard’s childhood in a moment of

seemingly banal misconduct.26 Due to his grandmother’s illness, Richard and his brother

are told to stay out of the way and to keep quiet, however, Richard recalls that he “ached

with boredom” (9-10). Looking around him, he finds nothing to capture his attention

except a fireplace, and becomes possessed with the sudden desire to set something

ablaze. Curiously, his actions are not impulsive. He does not take the first object at hand

and toss it into the fire. Instead, he considers what objects would not be missed. He

ultimately settles on a small number of strands from a broom, which he burns to his own

delight. His brother warns him to stop before he sets the whole broom on fire, but

24 While Shelby extracts a set of moral precepts from the book, the book itself never states these ideals directly, making his suggestion that it is a work concerned with morality but not performing a didactic function persuasive. 25 Other critics have noted the didactic orientation of Wright’s work including Jerry W. Ward who asserted that, “We do not need to beg the question of whether Wright created propaganda or literature. His novels instruct; they challenge beliefs about the human condition…Wright’s unique development of the thesis novel or the novel as essay was a landmark moment in American and African American literature” (174). 26 Due to the fictionalized nature of the autobiography, I will be referring to the story’s narrator and protagonist as “Richard” and the book’s author as “Wright.” 106

Richard’s curiosity is not sated. He then begins to wonder about the curtains in the room

and what would happen if he were to use the straw to set them on fire as well (10). His

brother protests, but he acts too quickly, and the situation gets out of hand. “Red circles

were eating into the white cloth; then a flare of flames shot out. Startled, I backed away.

The fire soared to the ceiling and I trembled with fright” (10-11). Fearing the corporal

punishment that would soon follow, Richard runs, intending to never return. His chosen

hiding place under the house, however, reveals his limited ability to carry this plan out.

As he remains hidden, he hears screams and sounds from the arriving fire brigade. He

worries that he has burned his mother and grandmother alive. In time, however, his

mother comes looking for him for and drags him from his underground sanctuary, soon

giving him the beating he had been anticipating. “I was lashed so hard and long that I lost

consciousness. I was beaten out of my sense and later I found myself in bed, screaming,

determined to run away, tussling with my mother and father who were trying to keep me

still” (13). The beating left him incapacitated for days, and for years to come, Richard,

“was chastened whenever [he] remembered that [his] mother had come close to killing

[him]” (.ibid).

In some ways, this scene of rebellion and punishment seems like a logical way to begin a Bildungsroman. After all, the genre is often concerned with the growth and socialization of young people, and a significant part of this process involves the establishment of behavioral norms, as well as the consequences for transgressing them.

However, the extremity of Richard’s transgression and the punishment received both stand out, particularly as the opening scene of a story focused on childhood and growing

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up. Richard does not simply disobey his mother and earn himself a simple reprimand.

Instead, he burns down the family’s home and is nearly beaten to death as a result. The

general moral formula is a familiar one, but both punishment and crime are of an extreme

nature, suggesting that something is amiss in terms of the book’s moral universe. The

young author might not simply need to come to understand the morals and ethics

common in the world around him. Instead, his task just might be to come to recognize the

limitations of that moral system. This tactic of making injustice visible for the purposes

of engaging what Colin McGinn calls the reader’s “moral sensibility” is present

throughout the novel. During these frequent scenes of moral uncertainty, the

foregrounding of these complications serves two important purposes. First, doing so

makes the presence of injustices apparent to readers who might otherwise deny their

existence. Second, it serves as the basis for the book’s developing ethical sensibilities,

reflected upon in narration to model a kind of thoughtfulness on moral issues.

While the book’s opening scene lays out a seemingly simple moral situation of a

child’s transgression and a parent’s punishment in response, later scenes challenge that

system of authority by calling into question the moral correctness of his parents and the difficulty in following their ethical commandments. In doing so, Black Boy makes clear how complicated attempting to live a “good life” is, even in the most seemingly simple of circumstances. In narration, Richard states that his father “was the lawgiver in our family” and that he “never laughed in his presence” (16). His father’s presence is a commanding and terrifying one, and the man seems to have asserted a sense of complete authority over his children. As Richard learns about the behavioral and moral boundaries

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he must not transgress, he seems to have also internalized the logic that his father’s

commands are always to be followed without question. This particular style of authority

creates a problem when Richard and his brother find a stray kitten near the house. As

they play with it, the cat meows loudly, waking their father and bringing him outside.

First, he orders them to simply “drive it away,” which they attempt to do unsuccessfully.

When they report their failure, his response only grows harsher. “Kill the damn

thing!...Do anything, but get it away from here!” In narration, Richard makes it clear that

he understands his father’s meaning, that he was not literally ordering the cat’s demise.

However, out of resentment for his father, seeking some measure of revenge for his

inattention and cruelty, Richard announces to his brother, “He said for us to kill the

kitten...and I’m going to kill ‘im” (17). His brother runs away, afraid of what is to come,

while he fashions a noose and hoists the animal off the ground by the neck. “It gasped,

slobbered, spun, doubled, clawed the air frantically; finally its mouth gaped and its pink-

white tongue shot out stiffly” (17-18).27 When he informs his brother what he had done,

his reaction is one of quiet outrage. “You did bad...He didn’t mean for you to kill ‘im,” to

which Richard responds with feigned befuddlement, “Then why did he tell me to do it?”

(18). Richard knowingly takes an immoral action in order to follow the directives given

to him by a figure in a position of authority. Though he does this primarily to spite his

father, it also sets up one of the book’s most strongly featured moral “lessons,” that living

an ethical life is not always compatible with obeying the commands given by those in

27 Death is a focus of several of Wright’s works. Abdul R. Jan Mohamed explores the political significance of death in the author’s body of work in “Rehistoricizing Wright: The Psychopolitical Function of Death in Uncle Tom’s Children.” 109 positions of power. Richard frames the aftermath of this situation as a victory, stating that, “I had had my first triumph over my father. I had made him believe that I had taken his words literally. He could not punish me now without risking his authority” (19). He explains further that, “if he whipped me for killing the kitten, I would never give serious weight to his words again” (19). Though the means were deplorable, Richard’s act of resistance is a potent one that lays the foundation for later resistance of unjust authority.

However, this does not mean that Richard or those around him view this act as a defensible one. In particular, his mother is able to elicit the remorse or contrition that his father was unable to by taking a far different approach. Where his father attempted to show his authority through his natural hierarchical position and through force, his mother,

“being more imaginative, retaliated with an assault upon my sensibilities that crushed me with the moral horror involved in taking a life” (19). That specific phrase “moral horror” will be a key one for understanding Wright’s approach to ethical instruction throughout the text.

This potentially presents a problem as Wright seems to be invoking “moral horror” in Black Boy and in many of his other works. Are the depictions of violence and the reader’s potentially outraged reactions to them similarly ineffective and self-serving?

More importantly, is Wright’s autobiography a part of this deeply flawed protest tradition, or is its approach to morality ultimately something different? The violent act itself, the death of the cat at Richard’s hands, is certainly gruesome, but it is hardly senseless or unmotivated. Young Richard’s motivations are questionable and perhaps deplorable, but they are explained through prior fictional context and the narrator’s

110 internal monologue. His actions come from his resentment of his father and a desire to undermine his authority. Similarly, his mother’s critique of his actions is not simply that one of “theological terror,” confronting the boy with the potential of damnation for his immoral actions. This is only her first approach, “All that afternoon she directed toward me calculated words that spawned in my mind a horde of invisible demons bent upon exacting vengeance for what I had done” (19). And in a sense, this proves to be somewhat effective as the narrator reports, “anxiety filled me and I was afraid to go into an empty room alone.” There is some sense of justice in the fact that he feels fear in retaliation for what he has done, but it will likely do little to change his behavior or perspective on the world around him.

Far more effective is his mother’s next approach, which confronts the boy with the material consequences of his actions. She tells him, “You owe a debt you can never repay,” and that despite his apologies, “Being sorry can’t make that kitten live again.”

Just before going to bed, she orders him to go outside and bury the kitten. Richard responds that he’s scared, but she simply asks, “And wasn’t that kitten scared when you put that rope around its neck?” (.ibid). He relents and ventures into the dark yard to start his morbid task. Doing so forces the boy to reflect on his actions, “Though I knew that I had killed the kitten, my mother’s words had made it live again in my mind...Shuddering,

I fumbled at the rope and the kitten dropped to the pavement with a thud that echoed in my mind for many days and nights...as I handled [sic] its cold body my skin prickled”

(20). When the job is done, Richard’s mother commands him to repeat a prayer asking to spare his life though he did not do the same for the kitten. Speaking these words aloud

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sends Wright into a panic, running into the night. He eventually returns and, “Contrite, I

went to bed” (21). It is important to pause for a moment to consider the distinction between the approaches taken by Richard’s father, mother, and by protest novelists such as Stowe.

Richard’s father’s appeal to authority ultimately proved ineffective as he was able to follow the “letter of the law” while still defying “the spirit of the law,” attempting to follow his father’s command while purposefully misunderstanding its meaning. His

father’s demand of pure obedience depends on a kind of fear that resembles the

“theological terror” that Baldwin sees at the root of Stowe’s work. Both have the

appearance of power in the moment, but ultimately prove ineffectual in the long term. His

mother finds a different solution. Her rhetorical approach was so potent that her words

had “made it live again in [his] mind.” Not only does she appeal to his sense of shame

and moral horror, she also makes visible the context and consequences of his actions, and

the result is far more potent. This approach to moral instruction, then, is a complicated

one. It relies somewhat on “telling” the boy that what he did was wrong to some degree

of effectiveness. However, far more potent is to simply “show” him the results of his

actions. It is this advice, and this approach to pedagogy that will play out over the course

of the book, combining detailed descriptions of injustice with redundant narration that

makes the meaning and context of injustice apparent. In doing so, readers are forced to

confront not only the individual instance of cruelty or brutality, but the systems that

enabled it to take place. This approach has a far greater effect on future actions than the

simple appeals to authority made by Baldwin’s protest novelist and Wright’s fictionalized

112 father figure. Both Wright’s mother and the text of Black Boy seek not only to show what is right and wrong, but to also change future behavior in response to this knowledge, making them distinct and more powerful than their counterparts.

As Richard grows older and more aware of the social circumstances around him, readers who would otherwise fail to recognize problems such as racism or poverty will find them harder to ignore due to the book’s didactic approach of making these problems visible. As a child, Richard notes that he had little concept of race at all (31). One day while playing outside, he looks up and sees, “what seemed to me to be a herd of elephants coming towards me...moving slowly, silently, with no suggestion of threat”

(66). He soon realizes that these were not animals but men, and more specifically, a group of mostly black men. Though he has recognized the group as human rather than a herd of animals, he continues to think of them as something less, noting that they wear

“elephant’s clothing.” More disturbingly, he continues to refer to them as “strange animals” and notes that “the legs of the black animals were held together by irons and that their arms were linked with heavy chains that clanked softly and musically as they moved (.ibid). It’s telling that Richard simultaneously recognizes their humanity and is unable to do so. While he sees their faces, they remain, in his mind, “black animals.”

Their restraints and the way that are forced to move and work as one denies them individuality and recognition as people. Richard races indoors to report his findings to his mother, announcing to her that there are elephants in the street. She is rightfully skeptical of his claim, and corrects him that what he’s seeing is a chain gang, or “a gang of men chained together and made to work...Because they’ve done something wrong and they’re

113 being punished” (67). Richard asks a series of follow up questions which she answers tersely. He asks why the white men don’t wear stripes like the black men, to which she replies that they are guards while the black men are prisoners. When asked if white men

“ever wear stripes,” she replies that they do sometimes, but that she has never seen it first-hand. In spite of her explanations, Richard remains confused, asking why there are so many more black men in stripes. His mother struggles to find an answer, saying, “It’s because...Well, they’re harder on black people” (67). His final question perhaps has the most resonance with broader problem of race in the book. “Then why don’t all the black men fight all the white men out there? There are more black men than white men…”

(68). His mother tells him that the white men are armed. While this satisfies him for now, the question remains a pertinent one as the book continues.

While much of our discussion to this point has focused on the development of an ethics of resistance, it is worth noting that this is only defined in reaction to a pervasive culture of fear. Richard is right to wonder why it is that a superior number of black citizens are willing to submit to a smaller number of white citizens. Shelby suggests that the reason for this dynamic is an ongoing process of socialization, arguing that, “blacks had been socialized into a culture of docility” by the “entrenched ethos of fear” of Jim

Crow America (517). This ethics of fear is set up in contrast with the ethics of the oppressed. While Shelby advocates for seeking solidarity and maintaining self-respect, the ethics of fear encourage a combination of servility and disloyalty among black

Americans, a potent combination that allows for the dynamic of the chain gang to exist unopposed. Coming to understand this dynamic, then, almost allows young Richard to

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complete his education on how race functions in Jim Crow-era America before moving

on to a more advanced course of study. Once he can see the way that racial boundaries

are drawn and expected patterns of behavior are formed, he then has the necessary

foundation for the book’s more pressing project: developing an ethical system in response

to these non-ideal conditions.28

As Wright grows older, his developing awareness of the role that race plays in his

life seems to naturally lead him to an understanding of the ethics of the oppressed. The

first element of the ethical system, seeking solidarity with those similar to himself, seems

to come naturally to young Richard as it mostly seems to entail forming social

connections with those around him.29 In his early teenage years, Wright recalls the way

that he ingratiates himself with boys near his age through conversation, and particularly

through demonstrating that his values mirror their own. “The touchstone of fraternity was

my feeling toward white people, how much hostility I held toward them, what degrees of

value and honor I assigned to race” (88). In the pages that follow, Wright recreates and

annotates one such schoolyard conversation in which boys move swiftly from trading

insults to commiserating over their shared experience of racial injustice. “‘Man, them

white folks sure is mean.’ Complaining. ‘That’s how come so many colored folks leaving

28 While Shelby’s ethics have been at the center of this chapter, there has been extensive work done on representations of the Jim Crow culture of fear. Most notably, Brian Norman and Piper Kendrix Williams’ 2010 collection Representing Segregation proposes a new generic categorization, the segregation narrative, to define works such as Wright’s that attempt to represent both the spatial elements of the Jim Crow era and its psychological elements as well, with a specific focus on the way lynching was used to maintain strict social boundaries and prevent transgression (5). 29 Lawrence Blum’s work on race and solidarity is essential for understanding how solidarity functions and how it is distinct from other related concepts such as community. For Blum, solidarity is essentially political and is shaped by adversity: both traits that distinguish it from community. The appearance of adversity to members of a community may transform that community into a solidarity group (53). 115

the South.’ Informational… ‘The first white sonofabitch that bothers me is gonna get a

hole knocked in his head!’ Naive rebellion” (90). The narrator’s “annotations” of the

conversation, marking each statement as “complaining” or “naive rebellion” foreshadows the book’s later sections where non-diegetic commentary will play a much larger role.

While this conversation may seem like typical teenage complaining and boasting, it serves an important function. It allows this group of young black men to air their grievances with a system that does not value their lives, and creates a community with a common set of values. This informal brand of public discourse, therefore, serves not only to help shape the community, but to create a sense of solidarity between its members, a key element to both Wright and Shelby’s ethical systems.

While the importance of solidarity seems to become clear to Richard at an early age, it takes somewhat longer to learn the danger of its opposite: disloyalty. This may initially seem like a simple task, but as Richard learns, the implications of his actions for others of his race may not always be immediately apparent. Perhaps the best example of this comes when Richard takes a job selling story papers to the children in his neighborhood, a job he enjoys for the extra income and the chance to read the papers himself (141). Having access to fiction on a regular basis is an important and formative experience for Richard,—he claims that, “The cheap pulp tales enlarged my knowledge of the world more than anything I had encountered so far”—he soon learns that the papers that accompay the pulp supplements are funded by a white supremacist group, making it clear that his job and pastime are both implicated with an act of disloyalty.

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As he makes his rounds through the neighborhood, a family friend pulls him aside and starts asking him a series of pointed questions: where he gets the papers, where they are published, and if he got the papers from a white man (143). Richard replies that he gets the papers from a boy at school who orders them from a publisher in Chicago. He has not, however, read the papers beyond their fictional magazine supplements. His neighbor’s approach to this “teachable moment” is notable. He does not immediately tell

Richard why his actions could be perceived as “wrong.” Instead, he simply retrieves an older copy of the paper and asks him to take a close look at a comic featured prominently, saying, “Well, just look at that. Take your time and tell me what you think” (144).

Richard immediately notices that something is amiss, seeing a “picture of a huge black man with a greasy, sweaty face, thick lips, flat nose, golden teeth, sitting at a polished, wide-topped desk in a swivel chair.” The man is dressed extravagantly with his feet propped up on the desk, smoking a cigar with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln placed on the wall behind him. Richard soon realizes that the room depicted is the Oval Office before noticing the cartoon’s caption which reads, “The only dream of a nigger is to be president and sleep with white women! Americans, do we want this in our fair land?

Organize and save white womanhood!” (.ibid). It takes Richard a moment to process what he has seen, knowing that the image and its accompanying rhetoric are familiar, but feeling unsure as to where he had seen it before. His neighbor explains that the paper is advocating white supremacist doctrine, much like the Ku Klux Klan, a group that Richard is familiar with. However, Richard finds this information confusing and hard to believe, especially since the papers come from Chicago, a place he had seen many of his friends

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and neighbors depart for hoping to escape racial injustice. However, his neighbor offers

yet more evidence, reading him “a long article in which lynching was passionately

advocated as a solution for the problem of the Negro” (145). The case offered against

selling the papers is a detailed one, but it is not made without compassion. “Listen.

You’re a black boy and you’re trying to make a few pennies. All right. I don’t want to stop you from selling these papers, if you want to sell ‘em...If you sell ‘em, you’re just helping white people to kill you” (.ibid).

The ethical situation is most certainly a complicated one. Desperation can justify

many things that would otherwise seem unscrupulous or immoral. However, Richard’s

neighbor makes a compelling case that perhaps selling these papers is one action that

cannot be justified. The argument appeals to Richard logically and emotionally. It leaves

him feeling both afraid that his community will view him as a traitor and ashamed of

what he had done. While living under injustice and inequality might make some immoral

actions acceptable, or at least understandable, Richard quickly realizes that his mistake

was ultimately that his actions inadvertently caused him to betray the ethics of the

oppressed in favor of the Jim Crow ethics of fear.30 This moment is a crucial one for

Richard’s moral development as it makes him aware of the unseen ethical implications of

his actions, that one can be disloyal without meaning to do so. In his future interactions,

then, he will be more careful to maintain his solidarity with his fellow man.

30 For more on the politics of racial betrayal, see Randall Kennedy’s Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal. 118

Much of the development of Richard’s moral framework has been implied rather than explicitly stated to this point. It seems fitting that Richard’s moral code would coalesce into something more defined as he nears graduation from school. After all, if a

Bildungsroman is the story of development and education, it would seem appropriate for his graduation ceremony to truly mark the end of his childhood and his advancement into the world as an adult, complete with a developed sense of moral behavior. In spite of his tendency to get into conflict with authority figures at school, Richard graduates as valedictorian. To mark his achievement, he is asked to write a speech to be delivered at graduation. He is surprised, then, shortly afterward, when the principal informs him that he will not be allowed to give a speech of his own writing, and instead will have a pre- written speech provided for him (192-3). The principal explains, “Listen, boy, you’re going to speak to both white and colored people that night. What can you alone think of saying to them? You have no experience…” (193). While the principal first tries to argue for using a prepared speech to no avail, he eventually changes tactics, threatening to withhold Richard’s diploma if he refuses (194). When he still refuses, he muses in mock disappointment, “I was seriously thinking of placing you in the school system, teaching.

But, now, I don’t think that you’ll fit” (194). Richard’s developing awareness of how the system of exploitation surrounding him shows in the narration immediately following this comment. Rather than falling for the principal’s reverse psychology, he recognizes it and resists, “He was tempting me, baiting me; this was the technique that snared black young minds into supporting the southern way of life” (.ibid). And just like that, Richard has demonstrated how both he had learned to recognize and resists such techniques, and

119 informed the reader of them. The pedagogical purpose of the scene is a dual one, representing both Richard’s development as a conscious citizen of an unequal country and an attempt to raise the reader’s awareness of that inequality. The principal makes one last case, encouraging Richard to, “Wake up” and “Learn the world you’re living in”

(195). However, he refuses, and returns home to consider his decision further. In both refusing the offer and explaining the reasons for doing so, Richard foregrounds the centrality of self-respect to his ethics, demonstrating that it overrides economic opportunity, friendship, and family. He ultimately resolves to give his own speech, even if it means leaving his home behind and seeking opportunities elsewhere. On the night of graduation, he gives his speech without incident (197). The speech acts as a fitting culmination to the book’s first section, ending Richard’s growth and development and moving him directly into adulthood. As he attempts to leave Jackson behind, he will need to both make his way in the world, and attempt to maintain his ethical system in practice.

After graduation, Richard finds that leaving the city and heading north is not as simple as it seems. Doing so requires money, and acquiring that money inevitably requires him to seek work at white-owned businesses. He takes a series of jobs, first at a hotel, then at a movie theater, none of which last for a particularly long period of time.

However, both jobs present Richard the opportunity to accelerate his escape from his home state through theft. While working at the hotel, he notices that his co-workers, while outwardly polite and deferential to the white management and guests, frequently stole from both the hotel and its visitors. Stealing was so common at the hotel that one of

Richard’s co-workers called him a “dumb nigger” for not taking whatever valuables are

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left within his reach (218). In narration, he clarifies that his decision not to steal while

working at the hotel was not out of a sense of moral obligation, “I did not approve of

[stealing] because I knew that, in the long run, it was futile, that it was not an effective

way to alter one’s relationship to one’s environment” (219). This logic, in short, is the

ethics of the oppressed in action. An oppressed people’s relationship to moral obligations

may be altered by their desire to escape from that oppression if at all possible. However, if a conventionally immoral action offers no such opportunity, then it has little value.31

Soon afterward, however, while working in the movie theater, a more actionable

opportunity presents itself to Richard. As he takes tickets, another employee approaches

him, asking if he wants to take part in a scam to sell the same ticket multiple times and

keep the profits for themselves. Richard reluctantly agrees, finding the extra money

useful as he saves for his ticket north (224-5). With the money from this scam, and from committing a small number of burglaries, stealing a gun and restaurant supplies from a local storehouse, Richard is able to afford the cost of his trip and supplies to travel to

Memphis (226-7). The motivation for these actions is clear as he thinks to himself that he is, “making the first lap of my journey to a land where I could live with a little less fear”

(227). Curiously, as he leaves town, he begins to cry, not out of a sense of guilt, but out of relief. He believe that he will never again feel forced to take on the “burden” that crime brings with it.

31 It is notable that Wright’s ethical system differs from Shelby’s ethics of the oppressed here in that Wright holds fast to the idea that an act of resistance or immorality should be taken on only when the chance of lessening one’s oppression presents itself. Shelby states that he does not believe this to be the case. Wright, then, appears to be more closely aligned with Ann Cudd’s theories on oppression that argue for a more traditionalist view of morality in which an immoral action is only justifiable with the potential to lessen oppression (either personal or collective) in the short or long term (Cudd 191). 121

Richard's early adult life is marked by an imperfect struggle to live an ethical life.

After heading north to Memphis, he finds work, but encounters racist co-workers and a persistent culture of violence (257). While this is largely an extension of the book’s early chapters, Black Boy’s publication history seems to imply a more hopeful reading of this situation, one that suggests a false narrative of progress. When the book was originally published in 1945, the biography’s second book, “The Horror and the Glory” was omitted at the request of the Book of the Month Club after the organization expressed interest in only the first book, “Southern Night.” The second book remained unpublished until 1977 when it was published separately as American Hunger. It wasn’t until 1991 that a

complete edition of Black Boy was released by Library of America.32 While this division may initially seem insignificant, it dramatically alters the meaning of the conclusion of the first book. Toward the end of “Southern Night,” Richard resolves to become a writer.

In order to do so, he realizes that he must move north, believing that doing so will both

help him realize his career as an artist and live with greater dignity and less fear. The final paragraph of “Southern Night” suggests that this is a real possibility:

With ever watchful eyes and bearing scars, visible and invisible, I headed North, full of a hazy notion that life could be lived with dignity, that the personalities of others should not be violated, that men should be able to confront other men without fear or shame, and that if men were lucky in their living on earth they might win some redeeming meaning for their having struggled and suffered here beneath the stars. (285)

32 Wright’s works have a history of incomplete publication. James R. Giles’s “Richard Wright’s Successful Failure: A New Look at Uncle Tom’s Children” outlines the publication history of Wright’s short story collection. The first edition omitted the introductory essay, “The Ethics of Growing Up Jim Crow” and the final story, “Bright Morning Star.” The meaning of the collection, he argues, is dramatically altered by their inclusion or omission. 122

The promise of these lines is alluring, and suggests that Richard, in this moment, has completed his development both as a moral figure and started his development as an artist. This interpretation is entirely reasonable when removing the second volume of the book from the equation. However, taking the remainder of Wright’s narrative into account suggests that this promise is a false one, and that the process of learning to live a moral life in an immoral society is an ongoing one.

For a time, the second book of Black Boy, “The Horror and the Glory” continues on this hopeful trajectory. Richard experiences less overt racism, and he quickly finds work as a porter in a shop while angling for a position in the local post office, a position that would allow him time to write. In addition to the change of location, “The Horror and the Glory” introduces a formal element absent in “American Hunger.” Throughout the second half of Black Boy, Wright begins to punctuate his narration with extended asides. These extra-diegetic discourses cover topics such as racial discrimination and its psychological effects. The first of these asides appears after Richard’s first disagreement with his new employer, which comes largely as a result of their different racial backgrounds. Set off from the rest of the narration with parentheses, Wright muses on the lingering impact of segregation on his state of mind, “The fact of the separation of white and black was clear to me; it was its effect upon the personalities of people that stumped and dismayed me” (265). As he continues, however, Wright’s thoughts lose their attachment to the specific moment in time in the main narrative, and instead turn more abstract, “I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination. In

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order to escape the racial attack that went to the roots of my life, I would have gladly

accepted any way of life but the one in which I found myself” (266). As the aside

continues, Wright posits that it is his own desire to find a way to live with dignity, by the

ethics of the oppressed, that is at the root of his discomfort, “I had elected, in my fevered

search for honorable adjustment to the American scene, not to submit and in doing so I

had embraced the daily horror of anxiety, of tension, of eternal disquiet” (.ibid). These

asides are doubly significant as they mark two distinct departures from the book’s first

section.33 First, they show Richard’s growth as a character. In this new phase of his life,

having found an ethical system and having removed himself from the South, he is

capable of a greater degree of reflexivity. He is able to consider his situation and draw

conclusions about how to best live with dignity and in solidarity with those around him.

Rather than merely surviving in a kind of bare life, he can reach for something more

fulfilling and complete. Second, and more relevant to the larger goals of this chapter,

these asides serve as a form of redundancy, reinforcing the moral and ethical concepts

that are explored through the plot’s events, narration, and dialogue. The asides show

Wright employing a more direct form of didacticism than in earlier chapters as he makes

the significance of the later events of his life clear to his reader, and in doing so, attempts

to offer them an education in the ethics of the oppressed.

While much of the book to this point has engaged in the sort of didacticism

common to the Bildungsroman, in which readers learn along with the protagonist, these

33 While these asides are relevant for our purposes in this chapter, they represent a tendency of Wright’s that has been the target of some criticism. Jeraldine R. Kraver praised Wright’s Rite of Passage specifically for omitting these kinds of “intrusive polemical rhetoric,” allowing the prose itself to be the focus of the work. 124

asides offer an additional, and more direct, form of didactic instruction outlined in an

earlier part of this project. In particular, these asides function as a kind of redundancy,

making the meaning of a particular set of events clear to readers and ensuring that they

“take away” the correct pieces of information from it. Susan Suleiman offers the example

of an author laying out a set of events, having characters interpret these events in dialog,

and finally having a narrator reinforce this interpretation as a kind of redundancy that is designed to foreclose “incorrect” interpretations and ensure clarity (Suleiman 42). In her estimation, this is a fundamentally reductive move, and one that is counter to the entire literary enterprise. However, the narrator’s asides in Black Boy offer a variation on this theme, and one that seems far less condescending and insidious than Suleiman might have imagined. While the asides will at times contain a direct assertion, which could color a reader’s interpretation just as often, these assertions will be coupled with an uncertainty or ambivalence that seems to pose a question to the reader as much as instruct them on the “right” way of thinking. When the narrator muses, “I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination,” he does so in not entirely certain terms, both planting an idea about the horrible effects of racial inequality, but providing readers with few clear instructions or interpretations. This open-endedness persists not only in the asides, but in the narration, both underlining the complexity of the ethical struggles considered in the book, and marking it as distinct from simplified moralistic fiction.

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While the early sections of “The Horror and the Glory” seem to continue the optimism that concludes “American Hunger,” a stark tonal shift takes place before long.

With the depression comes a decline in opportunities available to the young writer, and the end to his sustainable writing schedule. Further, lack of economic opportunities leads

Richard to accept work that he previously would have found despicable. After a period of unemployment, he finds morally questionable work through a cousin, selling insurance policies for a burial society (288). Even that line of work dries up as the Depression worsens, leading Richard to apply for government assistance. He is assigned to work the sanitation detail at a hospital (305). The work is difficult and he is treated poorly by the medical staff. But more importantly, Richard’s briefly held belief that his early adulthood in Chicago could prove different than his childhood in the south is proven to be a mistake. He realizes that the hospital treated its employees of color as, “close kin to the animals we tended, huddled together down in the underworld corridors of the hospital...just as America had kept us locked in the dark underworld of American life for three hundred years--and we had made our own code of ethics, values, and loyalty”

(314). In this dehumanizing situation, Richard and his fellow black co-workers stay loyal to each other to in some small way resist the oppression that they experience regularly.

However, this line also forecasts a shift in his ethical priorities. While Richard had previously ignored the possibility of systemic change, seeking only survival within an unchanging, oppressive system, the extremes of hospital labor seem to prime him for involvement with activism, a prospect he had previously dismissed.

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Given his reservations, the fact that Richard’s path to joining the Communist

party is an indirect one is not particularly surprising. While having drinks with a number

of friends from the post office, one announces that one of his short stories has been

published by a little magazine called Anvil. He also encourages Richard to attend

meetings of the John Reed Club with him, a group for revolutionary artists (315). Given

Richard’s interest in both art and politics, his association with the group only seems

natural. However, his experiences with Communists in the past leave him suspicious of

the group and its motives (315-6). In spite of his reservations, Richard visits the offices of

the John Reed Club and is quickly incorporated into the group’s leadership. When he arrives, an editorial meeting is taking place which he is asked to sit in on. He listens and is given magazines to read with the expectation that he will assist with the running of the organization in the near future (316-7). Richard agrees to work with them, thinking that

he can fuse his goal of documenting black life in America with the party’s task of

highlighting the common struggles of workers worldwide by writing a series of

biographical sketches of black Communists. Soon afterward, he is fully brought into the

leadership of the club, a short period after first learning of its existence.

The party’s fear of dissenting opinions and its tendency to excommunicate

members who stray from party orthodoxy soon places Richard in a complicated ethical

position. Rather than selecting the most prominent black party members for his profiles,

Richard seeks out individuals who have the most interesting stories to tell. This criteria

leads him to speak with a man named Ross, telling him that he is most interested in “the

things that made [him] a Communist,” formative experiences from his early years that

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revealed systemic injustice to him (332). As innocuous as this sounds, Richard soon finds

himself the subject of party scrutiny as he is approached by party members worried about his “revolutionary loyalty.” It appears that Ross’s adherence to party doctrine has been called into question, and Richard’s reputation is damaged by association. A party representative suggests that if he wants to make his loyalty unquestionable, he should do

as another young communist does and acquire a wound at the hands of the police during a

demonstration (334). With this suggestion, Richard gains a new understanding of his

political peers. While he may feel that he is acting in the general interest of the party by

working to develop art that makes visible the struggles of workers of all races, this in

itself is not enough. In addition, there are other standards for behavior that are ultimately

more valued by the party, and some of these come into conflict with his own sense of

morals and ethics.

In time, it becomes clear that the party not only would rather he profile a different

subject for his project, but that they are skeptical of the whole endeavor. Richard ponders

in response, “What was the danger in showing the kinship between the sufferings of the

Negro and the sufferings of other people?” (336). Instead, they seem most interested in

using Richard’s interviews to gather information on party members in less than positive

standing. In particular, Ross remains high on the list of the party’s potential internal

enemies. This confronts Richard with a dilemma. Since joining the party, his ethical

priorities seem to have shifted. No longer does he only wish to survive with some

element of dignity. Instead, he seems to hold out some hope for the party to bring about

change to some of the conditions at the root of his oppression. The goals of the party,

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however, come to conflict with the ethical imperatives established earlier in the book for

solidarity and self-respect. The party asks that he limit how he acts and thinks in order to

stay in line with its goals. Further, it asks him to be disloyal to a fellow African

American, Ross, due to his potentially “dangerous views.” Perhaps, if success for the

party seemed assured, betraying these ideals might seem worthwhile as it could bring

about an end to Richard's oppression. However, as the party demonstrates itself to be

disorganized and more focused on internal conflict than on enacting change in the world,

the tradeoff seems increasingly to be a less enticing one.

It appears that Ross has simply fallen out of favor with the party, but it soon becomes clear that the situation is far more serious. One day while visiting Ross’s home,

his wife informs Richard that her husband is under indictment by the party for allegedly

informing on their activities (337). Ross assures Richard that the party representatives are

exaggerating his misdeeds, but Richard’s trust in his friend is ultimately shaken. In the

silence that falls after this conversation, Richard is able to reflect on the party

machinery’s ability to turn the two men against each other, who have far more in

common with one another than either shares with the party establishment. “We two black

men sat in the same room looking at each other in fear. Both of us were hungry. Both of

us depended upon public charity to eat and for a place to sleep. Yet we had more doubt in

our hearts of each other than of the men who had cast the mold of our lives” (338). This

exchange and subsequent realization sets in motion the events leading to Richard’s

decision to leave the Communist party permanently. During the next party meeting he

attends, he expresses his desire to leave amicably. The decision is put to a vote and

129 denied (360-1). His personal agency ultimately proves less powerful than the collective will. Given the suspicions of his peers that he was not fully committed or perhaps that he was working against the organization, it seems strange that they would want him to stay.

Richard is unsure of how to react to this, but simply elects to walk out of the room.

At first, Richard attempts to make a clean break from the party, cutting ties with the organizations he previously took part in and finding non-party-affiliated work (364).

However, he is soon contacted by party representatives asking him to attend a trial being held for Ross’s suspected crimes against the party. A representative explains that Richard should attend as, “We’re going to make an example out of Ross...His trial will be an education for the working class, and for you, too, if you’ll come” (.ibid). The trial itself is peculiar, first for its very existence. As the party is not an official governmental organization, it seems strange that it would have a legal structure in place to prosecute and censure its own members. The proceedings prove to be even more surreal. It begins with a series of speakers offering long monologues about topics ranging from the socialist view of history and the long struggle for the emancipation of the worker (370).

While this at first simply seems inefficient, it soon becomes clear that this is the foundation of a complex and rhetorically savvy process that targets both the man on trial and the wider community. These lengthy discourses on politics and history may initially seem unnecessary, a prologue that precedes a reading of charges and a presentation of evidence. In fact, they are an essential part of the process that relies on establishing a common ethos among those assembled. By reviewing the Communist party’s official understanding of politics and history, those assembled are made aware of their shared

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ideology and goals, and by extension, the stakes of betraying those ideals. Richard notes

that, “The time had not yet come to include [Ross] and his crimes in this picture of global

struggle. An absolute had first to be established in the minds of the comrades so that they

could measure the success or failure of their deeds by it...It was a simple, elemental

morality. Communism had found a moral code that could control the conduct of men”

(371). Once the group’s ethos has been established, the party leadership need only to

explain briefly how the accused has worked against, or even simply not given enough

direct support to, the goals of the party and the crowd will have little choice but to

conclude that the accused is at fault. After a long meeting, consisting of a series of

speakers on the global struggle against capitalism, Ross’s friends are asked to read the

charges against him. The effect is immediate, “Ross wilted. His emotions could not

withstand the weight of the moral pressure. No one was terrorized into giving information

against him. They gave it willingly...The black mass of Ross’s wrongdoing emerged

slowly and irrefutably” (373). When the time comes for Ross to speak on his own behalf,

he simply admits his guilt and weeps before the crowd. The effect is twofold as the

weight of history and the years of collective struggle are added to whatever seemingly minor slight the accused has committed. There is the logical statement of facts coupled with the emotional or pathetic appeal that strikes the accused just as much as the wider audience. Richard finds both “horror” and “glory” in the proceedings as he is both in awe of the power of the seemingly righteous moral authority that the party wields, but horrified that he knew he would stand trial for treason if they held any kind of state

131 power. Richard leaves the trial with a strong sense of both the power and danger of this kind of moral pressure at work.

Unlike the man on trial, however, Richard feels no strong affective ties to the party and its message, and subsequently is able to walk away seemingly unscathed.

However, party members continue to harass him at work and at home, spreading rumors about him filing complaints to his employer. The book ends with a curious scene taking place on May Day. He passes a workers’ parade and sees an old friend who encourages him to join the march. Richard is hesitant at first but his friend insists, telling him that on

May Day, his past troubles with the party do not matter (380). Richard, it turns out, was right to be suspicious as party members soon shun him and he is forced to leave the march before it begins. Richard leaves feeling defeated, and ultimately with his worldview shaken (381). For a time he appeared to believe that collective action could in some way change the oppression that he experienced throughout his life, but no longer.

Instead, he closes the book feeling just as unsure of his ability to change his conditions as when he first began.

The question remains, then, what moral imperatives does the book leave its reader with? What message, or set of instructions can they take away from it? The book does not conclude on a note of despair. Instead, Richard places his hopes in both solidarity and writing. In this difficult moment, he resolves to continue to write, to make art, and to continue to try to understand the world to the best of his abilities as the best means of resistance available to him: “I would hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to match,

132 to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that knows in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human” (384). The book’s final lines are a powerful, if abrupt statement of the author’s priorities. In the future, he will write, he will attempt to express the shared experience of all humanity, and hope to build connections with others—a sentiment that echoes Baldwin’s desire for a kind of fiction that reveals something a little closer to the truth. While the book concludes on an uncertain note, it remains in line with the model of moral thoughtfulness developed throughout the work.

While Black Boy may suggest a set of ethical principles, more importantly, it models a reflexive approach to confronting moral issues that is not easily reducible to a set of commandments. Instead, it encourages readers to consider the broader ethical implications of their actions as well as the motivations of others while they strive to live the best possible life within a highly imperfect world.

III. The Morality of “A Novel Without a Moral”

While the morally didactic emphasis of Wright’s autobiography might come as a surprise to readers familiar with works like Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children, the same cannot be said for one of his contemporaries, Jessie Redmon Fauset.34 Fauset is most often remembered as the literary editor of The Crisis whose tenure saw early publications by figures such as Langston Hughes--earning her the dubious and

34 George Hutchison argued that one of the goals of Fauset’s first novel, There is Confusion, was to make a point about the African American middle class in “clear moral terms” (51). 133

condescending recognition as the one who “midwifed the so-called New Negro Literature into being” (Stokes 68). More troublingly, writers such as Claude McKay remarked on

Fauset from a personal perspective, calling her “prim,” and suggesting that she belonged to, “that closed decorous circle of Negro society, which consists of persons who live proudly like the better class of conventional whites, except that they do so on much less money.”35 In spite of her friendly relations with the more radical elements of the Harlem

literary community, McKay insisted that, “in her social viewpoint she was away over on

the other side of the fence” (.ibid).36 Given this reputation, it is less surprising that

Fauset’s fiction, regarded by her peers and by contemporary critics to be genteel or

conventional when compared to the more formally ambitious novels of the time, should

carry with it a moralistic tendency. Perhaps it is this reputation, both literary and

personal, that she was responding to in part when she decided on the subtitle of her

second novel, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral.37 While this title might suggest an amoral work, the novel itself proves this not to be the case, at least in one sense of the word. While Plum Bun may lack a clearly stated or clearly discernible “moral of the story,” a single line that summarizes the book’s “message” to its reader, it remains a work

35 Without mentioning Fauset directly, Richard Wright criticized this school of African American fiction in “The Blueprint for Negro Writing” stating, “Generally speaking, Negro writing in the past has been confined to humble novels, poems, and plays, decorous ambassadors who go a-begging to white America. They entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people. These were received as poodle dogs who have learned clever tricks” (268). 36 Elizabeth Ammons has suggested that Fauset’s reputation as a misfit or outlier in the Harlem Renaissance may be a result of the tendency among critics to view women writers as existing on the periphery of the literary tradition rather than its center. When considered in connection with other women writers, especially Edith Wharton, Ammons argues that Fauset appears far more representative. 37 Other critics have examined Fauset’s work in connection with challenging conventional morality. Cheryl Wall views the forestalled romance in The Chinaberry Tree to be a critique of conventional morality (78). 134

deeply concerned with a variety of moral issues. Most prominently, it explores through

the life of its central character, Angela Murray, the ethics of navigating a racist,

segregated society and the possibility of passing as an attempt to circumvent the restrictions placed on non-white people in early twentieth century America. Through

Angela’s experiences, and her thoughts reflecting on them, readers may be able to extract a set of moral guidelines, a set of guidelines that closely resemble Shelby’s ethics of the oppressed.

The subtitle, “A Novel with a Moral” is significant as it signals, perhaps mistakenly, to the novel’s reader that they should employ a specific set of reading practices. This is not a conduct book or morality tale, simply constructed for only educational purposes. Instead, it asserts its literary nature by rejecting moralism, a move that says as much about the way that critics and authors understand literariness itself as it does about Fauset’s novel.38 While her first novel, There is Confusion, was met with

negative responses relating to its conservative moralism, her sophomore effort might

receive a better assessment from critics if it at least outwardly avoids the trappings of

didacticism.39 Asserting that her novel lacks a moral, Fauset signals to her reader that it

is a work to be read for its aesthetic qualities, not for education or moral uplift. Its value

lies in the story it tells, not in the information that can be carried away from it. In making

38 Of course, it is my purpose in those work to suggest that literariness and didacticism (or in this case, moral didacticism) need not be incompatible. However, that does not change the perception that authors such as Faucet faced. 39 Wallace Thurman’s assessment of There is Confusion as, “an ill-starred attempt to popularize the pleasing news that there were cultured Negroes, deserving of attention from artists, and of whose existence white folks should be apprised” reflects the common criticism of Fauset’s work that its main purpose seemed to be to show how upper-middle class African Americans could imitate their white peers, both aesthetically and morally, in hopes of gaining their approval (qtd. In Stokes 68). 135

this claim she asserts her desire to be taken seriously by the reader and by the literary

community at large. Our task here will be to determine if her claim in fact holds up. Is

Plum Bun an amoral work, or does it have some moralistic qualities to it? Is it a novel to be read purely for its aesthetic qualities, or does it offer some efferent appeal? It is my contention that in spite of the claim made by its subtitle, Plum Bun is a deeply moralistic text and a didactic one at that. It both employs aspects of moralistic genres and is invested in a project of framing the racial issues that serve as its subject in moral terms.

Through familiar literary forms including the Bildungsroman and the seduction novel,

Fauset manages to produce both a complex moral universe and provides at least some amount of guidance of how to best live within it.40

Plum Bun is a generically complex and rich text, but at its core, its primary focus

is on the coming of age of its protagonist, a young mixed-race woman named Angela

Murray, making it essentially an Ethnic Bildungsroman. Angela’s development as she learns the “way of the world” primarily focuses on her racial identity and her relationship to it, making this not only an example of the Bildungsroman, but an Ethnic

Bildungsroman in which the process by which its central character comes to understand race is just as important as that same character’s growth and development in other areas.

Angela’s education on how race relations function in early twentieth century America began at an early age. During her childhood, she witnessed how she was treated differently than her darker-skinned sister and father, and how her apparent whiteness

40 Fauset’s use of conventional forms has been the subject of debate for critics since her first publication. Deborah McDowell has suggested that these conventional forms served as a, “deflecting mask for her more challenging concerns” (86). 136 granted her a greater degree of mobility about the city (14). Angela and her mother

Mattie, who was also light-skinned and capable of passing as white, would make frequent trips into the city outside of their predominantly black neighborhood. During these trips,

Mattie seemed to take great delight in transgressing racial boundaries, taking her daughter to establishments where they would not have been allowed had their race been known (15). While Mattie views this as a small rebellion against an unjust system, as she knows as well as anyone that racial divisions are arbitrary and based on nothing other than prejudice, her daughter comes to view things differently, concluding from her mother’s actions that race itself isn’t a problem in America. It is making one’s race known that causes issues. This misunderstanding is an important one as it shapes

Angela’s future conduct to a considerable degree. While readers know that Mrs. Murray acts in defiance of an unjust system, acting out a desire to “transgress the place of the

Negro,” to borrow a phrase from Shelby, Angela only appreciates the material comforts and privileges of these experiences, missing entirely their subversive element. As she grows older, she internalizes this misunderstanding of her mother’s motives, coming to believe that she cared little about race and only about her own ability to experience the full array of pleasures that life has to offer.

Mattie’s passing does not continue without incident, however. During one of their

“Saturday adventures” in which Mattie and Angela journeyed into the city while passing for white, Mattie finds herself feeling faint and ultimately loses consciousness (58). Her daughter takes her to the nearest hospital, which happens to only serve white people. To avoid an incident, Mattie and Angela continue to pass as white, even as her husband

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Junius arrives to see his wife and take her home. Knowing that he would cause a scene if their true relationship was known, Junius presents himself as his wife’s chauffeur, and

Mattie goes along with the ruse. They leave, both seeming to be ashamed (59-60). As they exit the hospital, the narrator relays a comment made by a hospital staff member, one of the most overtly racist statements in the book, “The intern stepped back into the hospital raging about these damn white women and their nigger servants. Such women ought to be placed in a psychopathic ward and the niggers burned” (60). The violence of the intern’s statement is shocking as the discrimination faced by the Murray family to this point has been relatively polite in nature: they are denied entrance to restaurants, or a schoolmate will make comments about not trusting “coloured” people. While both are despicable in their own right, nothing approaches the explicit and brutal nature of this statement. It is unclear if comment is unheard by the Murrays or if they simply choose to ignore it due to their focus on Mattie’s health. Regardless, the impression that it leaves on

Angela seems to be fleeting as she continues to view passing as a useful way to gain social advantages, and fails to see any of the negative consequences that it can bring about. As the story progresses, however, echoes of this scene will appear throughout

Angela’s later life. Passing will prove to provide advantages, but come at the cost of weathering consistent insults made against her race and unavoidable acts of disloyalty in order to “maintain her cover” as a member of white society.

Given her mother’s experience, one might expect that Angela would grow up with a complicated relationship to passing, both seeing its advantages and its dangers.

However, in a pattern that repeats throughout the novel, Angela takes her experience with

138 racial prejudice and violence and draws some unexpected conclusions from it, thinking that her race itself is not a problem, but other people’s knowledge of it is. As long as she is able to effectively conceal her African American heritage, she believes that she will be able to seamlessly integrate into predominantly white areas of society. Unsurprisingly, the novel proves this to be an incorrect assumption, which is in itself uncommon for a story of this type. In a conventional Bildungsroman or in a conduct novel, characters frequently make mistakes, poor decisions, or suffer misfortunes. However, these mistakes are nearly sometimes accompanied by a kind of corrective statement either from a narrator, from another character, or from the character’s internal monologue.41 Fauset’s narrator takes a far more “hands off” approach, not offering any commentary about the correctness of Angela’s conclusions or the rightness of her actions. Instead, the character offers what amounts to a hypothesis about the best possible way to navigate a difficult encounter with race, and the later events of the novel act as a test of that hypothesis. Once

Angela’s theory of how to best live within this racist system has been tested and most often disproved, she then revises her hypothesis which will again be tested through the later events of the book. This approach is notably different than that found in Black Boy, where the book’s reflexivity is one of its defining features. Where Wright’s narrator, seemingly speaking from his present, reflects on the choices of his past self, Angela remains firmly grounded in the present. However, that does not mean that the didactic approaches of both works are entirely dissimilar. Angela, like Wright’s narrator, does

41 Wright’s asides in Black Boy or the narrator’s statements directed at the audience in seduction novels such as Charlotte Temple are examples of these kinds of corrective statements which perform a redundant function in the text, narrowing the audience’s interpretive opportunities for the purpose of greater clarity. 139

reflect on her actions, reasons through them, and comes to conclusions of her own. These

conclusions may prove to be incorrect by the end of the work. However, the process is

ultimately a similar one, just from a different temporal perspective.

Following her “Saturday adventures” with her mother passing in the city, Angela

comes to believe that her best course of action is to conceal her race whenever possible.

From early on in the novel, Angela is shown to be dissatisfied with her family’s place in

the city’s socio-economic order: “At a very early age she had observed that the good

things of life are unevenly distributed; merit is not always rewarded; hard labour does too

necessarily entail adequate recompense. Certain fortuitous endowments…contributed

toward a glowing and pleasant existence” (12-13). For Angela, this “glowing and pleasant existence” has a very particular meaning, which she spells out as she attempts to make sense of the social order, writing a series of rules for herself about how it works,

“First, that the great rewards of life—riches, glamour, pleasure,—are for white-skinned people only. Secondly, that Junius and Virginia were denied these privileges because they were dark” (17-8). While the narrator notes that she is only mistaken in thinking that

Junius and Virginia, and many others like this, have no interest in these kinds of pleasures, Angela’s worldview is ultimately shaped by her internalization of these

“rules.” Ultimately, she comes to pity “coloured people,” a group that she seemingly exempts herself from, for their inability to meet the “physical standards of white people”

(18).

Perhaps the greatest test of Angela’s growing racial ideology comes after the untimely death of her parents, after which point she decides to pass for white. As race is

140 not the issue for Angela in her estimation, it would follow that the best way to pursue her goals would be to do so while passing for white. Her identity is quickly discovered, however, and she is left considering her options yet again. Speaking to Jinny, she recalls the times throughout her life in which her race has proven to be an impediment to her. If she leaves the city, she leaves behind all knowledge of her heritage. She reasons to her sister, “Why should I shut myself off from all the things I want most,—clever people, people who do things, Art…travel and a lot of things which are in the world for everybody really but which only white people, as far as I can see, get their hands on. I mean scholarships and special funds, patronage” (78). For Angela, her decision is not a betrayal of her identity, but only a decision to choose one side of herself over another, “I am both white and Negro and look white. Why shouldn’t I declare for the one that will bring me the greatest happiness, prosperity and respect?” (80). From Angela’s present experience, her course of action would seem to be a logical one, even if the novel’s later events will call her decision into question. However, in this moment, the narrator simply describes Angela’s mindset as she leaves the city and her sister behind. “She had burned her bridges behind her, had resigned from school, severed her connection with the

Academy, and had permitted an impression to spread that she was going West to visit indefinitely a distant cousin of her mother’s. In reality she was going to New York” (82).

Moving to a new city offers Angela further opportunities to divest herself of her

African American identity. During her first days living in the city, she explores surrounding neighborhoods, thinking of all the subjects it provides her for her art. After a short period of exploration and idleness, however, she turns her attention to art and

141 begins taking classes at Cooper Union (93). It is here that she completes the process of reinventing herself, first introducing herself to other students as “Angèle Mory.” The change in name serves to break her connection from her family, and to suggest a continental background. Other students seem to sense her otherness, but ask if she is

French or Spanish by birth. Among her new friends and classmates, Angela notices one student of mixed race named Rachel Powell, almost always referred to in the text as

“Miss Powell.” Miss Powell is shown to be kept at a distance from the others in the group, as the narrator notices that she, “lent her belongings, borrowed nothing, and spoke only when she was spoken to” (95). After a class at the Union, Angela asks Miss Powell to lunch, and finds it to be an uncomfortable affair. The narrator remarks that, “Either

Miss Powell was actually dull or she had made a resolve never to let herself go in the presence of white people; perhaps she feared being misunderstood, perhaps she saw in such encounters a lurking attempt at sociological investigations” (109). Miss Powell’s reservations about opening up to Angela are somewhat revealing. First, it demonstrates how effective Angela’s assumption of this identity has been. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it shows the growing distance between Angela and her African American roots. While she stops short of adopting the racism of some of those around her, she clearly comes to view Miss Powell and those like her as other. She is not yet asked to be disloyal to those who share her heritage, but the thought of seeking solidarity with Miss

Powell never seems to cross her mind.

While the early stages of the novel function as a relatively conventional Ethnic

Bildungsroman, the novel’s generic makeup expands to include aspects of another

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didactic genre shortly thereafter: the seduction novel. As Angela works her way into the

bohemian culture of artists in Greenwich Village, she finds that not only her career

options have expanded, but her romantic prospects as well. At a party, she catches the

attention of Roger Fielding, a rich young man noted by the narrator primarily for his

blonde hair and “deep blue eyes” (115). In spite of Roger’s interest in her, Angela’s

friends warn her of becoming romantically entangled with him. Roger’s father would

only approve of a marriage between his son and a young lady of equal social standing.

Even if she were able to continue to pass, Angela lacks the required social capital to

make an appropriate bride for the young heir. Further reinforcing the warning, Angela’s

friend Paulette muses about the dangers that men like Roger pose to the women of the

world more generally, “It’s wrong for men to have both money and power; they’re bound

to make some woman suffer” (128).

In spite of the warnings she receives, Angela continues her relationship with

Roger, even going as far as to daydream frequently about all the good charitable work she could do for the African American community, a group she speaks of as if she were not included in it, if she were married to a man like Roger (131). In this moment, Angela weighs the moral consequences of her actions. By passing, she leaves her family and community behind. However, it also could give her access to financial resources which could be used for the betterment of African Americans at large. From a utilitarian perspective, the negative effects of her choice to pass could be negated by the greater amount of good she would be able to do. While the narrator offers no commentary on

Angela’s decision, her internal monolog acts as a narrative consideration of a moral

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problem. This fantasy of a philanthropic life is cut short one day at lunch with Roger. In

the middle of their conversation, Roger notices an African American couple eating at a

nearby table. He not only has the head waiter remove them from the restaurant, he returns

to brag about his dubious accomplishment to Angela, bragging, “Well I put a spoke in the

hell of those ‘coons’!! They forget themselves so quickly, coming in here spoiling white

people’s appetites,” before continuing to boast about how he spent his time at Harvard ensuring that the African American students did not gain access to too many opportunities (132-3). Roger claims that he could tell from how Angela looks at the

“coloured” people they have encountered that she held the same beliefs on race, a claim that she swiftly denies, resolving to not see him any longer after they part. However, her resolution is soon broken as she again begins to spend time with him.

Their relationship has an escalating series of consequences, something that is quite common in the seduction novel. Most disturbingly, her relationship with Roger leads her to distance herself from her sister, the last living member of her family, and her lone tie to the African American community. Jinny writes her, informing Angela that she

will be arriving in New York by train. Angela goes to meet her at the station, but finds

that Roger is there as well. In order to continue to pass, she chooses to pretend not to

know Jinny, an echo of an earlier moment in the novel where Angela’s mother pretends

that her father is her chauffer, an affront that damages their relationship. Jinny, like

Paulette, later warns Angela of the dangers of pursuing a relationship with a rich white

man. However, she coolly accepts her sister’s decision to continue to pass. Shortly

afterward, Roger makes his intentions much clearer. He offers to buy her a “love nest”

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either in the country or in the city, where they could be together in secret (182). He

reasons that while they could never be together through marriage, perhaps they should

embrace the spirit of free love (192). Unsurprisingly, Roger eventually is able to seduce

Angela in a scene that would fit well in an early American conduct novel. On a stormy

night, Roger pleads to be allowed to stay with Angela, but she insists that he go home. He

leaves, only to return shortly afterward, begging Angela to trust him (202-3).

In comparison to the conventional seduction novel, Angela’s experience is a relatively mild one. Early novels like Charlotte Temple and The Power of Sympathy follow a set pattern: After being seduced, their female protagonists, and often their male counterparts, are “punished” by an untimely demise. This makes the lesson abundantly clear: the consequences of seduction are severe, and most often fatal. However, the pain experienced by Angela in the wake of her relationship with Roger is far subtler, but no less affecting. As she comes to realize the way in which she was willing to turn her back on her family, her friends, and her community simply to gain the approval of one

(morally reprehensible) man, Angela, and by extension the reader, realizes that her future conduct in relationships likely needs to change. With this new knowledge in hand, she turns her attention to the other men in her life, and finds that she had been overlooking a number of far worthier suitors. The lesson is learned, and further, the knowledge gained is applied to future experiences. In this way, the book not only reinforces the “lesson” it teaches, it also suggests the possibility for future self-improvement by rejecting a deterministic moral universe. Subsequently, it seems inaccurate to describe Plum Bun as a novel without a moral. Instead, it builds on and modifies the formulas established in

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earlier iterations of moralistic genre fiction, rejecting the sensationalism and melodrama

that often characterized them in the American literary tradition.

The book’s generic focus shifts once again in the final chapters of the novels as a

new romantic interest, the artist Anthony Cross who is secretly passing for white, catches

Angela’s attention, leading to a turn toward the melodramatic.42 Exploring this relationship further puts Angela’s theories on race to the test and acts as a catalyst to the development of a sense of racial solidarity in the book’s protagonist. Angela makes her feelings toward Anthony known, but as they get closer, he pushes her away. A breaking point occurs during one of their final meetings in the book, when a pleasant conversation takes a turn, leading to Anthony excusing himself abruptly, saying, “Angel, Angel, I shall love you always. Life cannot rob me of that. Good-bye, my sweetest” (284). After this

meeting, Angela receives no word from him for ten days and hears nothing of him from

mutual friends, leading her to visit his apartment unannounced. Descriptions of the room

and Anthony himself foreshadow the revelation that is to come. Both the narrator and

their small talk focus on the painter’s old fashioned horsehair sofa which Angela, “had

never seen equaled for its black shininess and its promise of stark discomfort” (285). The

description of Anthony’s face as, “dark” and “tormented,” similarly emphasizes his

concealed blackness. Anthony seems cross at first, demanding to know why Angela is

there. Her confession of her feelings, telling him that, “I love you...I think you love me,”

does not receive the response she expects (.ibid). Instead, Anthony becomes even more

42 Ann Ducille has argued that Fauset was far more innovative than critics recognize. She writes of The Chinaberry Tree, “Fauset is indeed writing neither realism nor naturalism; nor is she falling back on pure romanticism. She is interrogating old forms and inventing something new.” 146 upset. He tells her that their relationship would be “impossible,” and admits to contemplating suicide, “I've half a mind to kill myself now, now before I go mad thinking how I've broken my promise, broken it after all these years,” he says, before looking at her longingly (286). In this moment, Fauset’s mode of writing seems to have shifted from the realist prose she favored earlier into that of the melodrama, complete with vague references as to why their love cannot be, thoughts of suicide in the face of a love that cannot be, and meaningful, but unacknowledged glances. Melodrama is a genre defined by excess in terms of emotions, and Anthony’s extreme response at first seems to fit into this genre. A romantic confession leads to a strong statement that their love cannot be.

However, as the conversation continues and readers receive more context, the reaction may not seem to be excessive in the least.

When asked why their love is impossible, he replies that he is “coloured.”

Knowing what his secret has been, his actions do not change, but our understanding of them does. When he says, “Yes, that's right, you damned American ! I'm not fit for you to touch now, am I? It was all right as long as you thought I was a murderer, a card sharp, a criminal, but the black blood in me is a bit too much, isn't it?” and claims that he will kill himself before he allows a lynch mob to come for him, his response seems understandable, if not entirely justified (287). Particularly revealing is his offhand comment that, “They'll never catch me as they did my father” (.ibid). In this moment,

Angela realizes, “the unspeakable depths of his acquaintance with prejudice” (288).

Given the earlier sections of the novel that invoke genres such as the seduction novel, it seems likely that Fauset is knowingly invoking the melodrama here in order to upset

147 readers’ expectations. Perhaps they will dismiss the scene’s emotional excess only to find that it is grounded in a history of racist violence. This recontextualization only makes it more powerful as a didactic tool as it helps a reader to understand the ways in which forces of history which may be invisible to outside viewers can invest simple interactions with the greatest of emotional and psychological weights.

It is in this moment that Angela resolves to tell Anthony that she too is passing.

However, first, she will listen to his family’s tragic story. Oddly enough, the story is not told through dialog between Anthony and Angela. Instead, it is presented through third person narration. Anthony’s father had been a sailor who married a woman named Maria in Brazil who passed for white but was of mixed race. After settling down in Georgia, a local man harasses Maria, believing her to be a white woman. When he learns of her ancestry, he becomes enraged and gather a mob, bringing it to the Cross family’s home.

Perhaps the eeriest detail of the story is the calm with which John Cross accepts his fate.

He had returned home before the fire. “They let him get into his house; he washed and dressed himself for death” before setting the house ablaze (291). When the mob comes, it is clear that it is their intention to, “teach this man their opinion of a nigger who hadn't taught his wife her duty toward white men” (.ibid). They called him to the window and before any words could be said, “Haley opened fire. The body fell over the railing, dead before it could touch the ground, murdered by the bullets from twenty pistols” (.ibid).

After John’s death is described in third person narration, perspective shifts back to

Anthony who continues the story in dialog, giving the aftermath a distinctly personal feel.

While the description of John’s end is horrifying, what follows it is what truly sets the

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story apart from the rest of Plum Bun’s narrative. Anthony describes the actions of

souvenir hunters who removed pieces of John’s body, leaving it “totally dehumanized.”

Worse still, young Anthony heard his father’s death and desecration described, leaving

him traumatized and unable to sleep for days. Since then, Anthony’s interactions with

white people have been uneasy. He declares that in the days that followed:

I made one vow and kept it, never by any chance to allow myself to become entangled with white people; never to listen to their blandishments; always to hate them with a perfect hate. Then I met you and loved you and somehow healing began. I thought, if she loves me she'll be willing to hear me through. And if after she hears me she is willing to take me, black blood and all…” (293).

Anthony never finishes his thought, but the implication is clear. If Angela, this woman

who he loves in spite of her seeming whiteness, is able to hear of his true heritage and

love him all the same, then maybe the healing process that started that their meeting

could be complete. Perhaps he could resolve some of his lingering hatred toward her

entire race.

While Anthony developed an (understandable) fear of white people, his mother

came to believe that all “coloured” people were to blame, believing them to be cursed

above all other peoples on the earth. Angela is shocked by his story to the point of being

speechless. After her silence, he continues, “Don't ask me how I came up. Angele, for a

time I was nothing, worthless, only I have never denied my colour,” (292).43 Internally,

Angela is impressed with his confession, thinking to herself, “Here was honour, here was

43 It is notable that at this point in the narrative, Anthony still refers to Angela in dialog by her subtle pseudonym, “Angele” or by the affectionate nickname, “Angel.” We noted earlier that for much of the book’s middle section, Angela maintains this dual identity, referring to herself in her interior monologues as “Angela” but outwardly presenting herself as “Angele.” Anthony’s habit of referring to Angela by her assumed name shows the continued power and effectiveness of her facade. 149

a man ! So would her father have been. Having found this comparison her mind sought

no further” (.ibid). Eventually she speaks, telling them that she has something to tell him

as well, but that she can’t tell him at once. She asks to see him tomorrow, but he

proclaims that they have no future, before making a dramatic exit. On hearing Anthony’s

story, it becomes clear that both members of this potential couple face similar ethical

concerns about entering into this relationship. For Anthony, loving a white woman leaves

him feeling guilty, as if he is being disloyal not only to his race, but to his father’s

memory as well, by renouncing his hatred of the entire white race. It is the potential of

disloyalty, one of the cardinal sins of Shelby’s ethics of the oppressed that is at the root of

this fear for him. Conversely, Angela’s hesitance is rooted in fear of being discovered and

losing the social advantages she has gained by passing.

Anthony’s story is significant both in its manner of presentation and its relation to the rest of the text. The decision to present the bulk of Anthony’s narrative in third person narration downplays the differences in rhetorical situation between Angela herself and the reader of Plum Bun. Were it presented in dialog, the reader’s experience might seem filtered through Angela and Anthony’s conversation in his apartment many years later.

Instead, attention is focused directly on the past events in Georgia. Rather than focusing on the emotional connection between the characters, the story stands alone to a greater degree. Rather than reading a story within a story, the reader and Angela are at a similar distance from the stories they are being told. The third person perspective also lends

Anthony’s account a veneer of historical objectivity. This is not the account of a son still grieving the loss of his father many years later, but a clear, understandable record of a

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moment in the past. Once the events leading up to his father’s death are clearly explained,

the narration shifts back to the earlier perspective, with Anthony explaining his reaction

to these events in dialog. This reminds both Angela and the reader that this experience is

a deeply personal one. In this way, Faucet can “have it both ways,” showing this event to

have a general historical importance and a deep personal significance.

To this point, Angela’s direct experience of racialized violence has been

extremely limited given her background, geographic location, and time in history. While

she has experienced verbal abuse from her schoolmates, witnessed her father’s shame at

having to pass himself off as his wife’s servant, and seen her romantic partner boast about

his own racial biases, Angela has never experienced the kind of direct violence that was

so important to shaping Anthony’s perspective. For Angela, the experience of her

“coloured” identity was largely one of inconvenience and disadvantage. For Anthony,

passing is essential to his survival, and yet he still lives in constant fear that his discovery

will lead immediately to his death. This scene puts Angela’s story into context, making

her complaints seem petty and her desire for whiteness all the more deplorable. Angela is

able to learn from Anthony’s struggles, not only about the experiences of other mixed

race people living in America, but about the ethics of her own actions to this point. It is a

moment in which Angela is able to recognize her privilege and begin to reassess her

worldview, in particular her long-held belief that “life is more important than colour.”

However, Angela does not choose to reveal her background to Anthony immediately, instead simply expressing her sympathy for his experiences before resolving to reveal her background as soon as she is able, finding herself not yet able to

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give up, “the assurance, even of the safety which the mere physical fact of whiteness in

America brings” (296). Angela’s decision to delay confessing her heritage leads to a rift

between the two, as Anthony writes her to thank her for understanding, but also to

confess that he believes their relationship to be impossible (297). She receives his letter

and is distraught, before ultimately going to see him to clear the matter up. The scene that

follows is a curious one. The narrator begins noting that Angela would in future years

have trouble recalling it, and that it was “as if in a dream.” In this moment, the book once

again falls into a melodramatic register. The unreal quality of the dialog serves to

underline Angela’s state of mind. Upon hearing of Angela’s family history, Anthony is

taken aback and given to making sweeping gestures, “He raised his arms, beating the

void like a madman” (300). Both gestures and dialogue are heightened as he exclaims,

“You in your foolishness, I in my carelessness, ‘passing, passing’ and life sitting back

laughing, splitting her sides at the joke of it. Oh, it was all right for you, but I didn't care

whether people thought I was white or coloured, if we'd only known” (.ibid). At first,

Angela is unsure why he is upset, but the situation soon becomes clear. Since he had

decided that he could not marry Angela and keep his promise to never become entangled

with white people, he began seeing an unnamed black woman who is soon revealed to be

Angela’s sister Jinny. They mutually decide that while they both want to be together, they

cannot under present circumstances. This conclusion might seem to be a fitting one,

wherein the consequences of Angela’s morally suspect actions catch up to her. Perhaps her temporary disappointment could serve as a reminder to hold fast to her developing system of values focused around family, community, and racial solidarity. However, the

152 novel does not conclude there, instead opting for a conclusion that is simultaneously more conventional and complicated.

In spite of the foregrounding of race and violence in the novel’s final sections, the focus remains on the romantic plot. The novel concludes with Angela deciding to travel to Europe after finally coming to terms with her racial identity. She hopes, it seems, to find a place where her race will not be seen as something to be concealed. Before leaving the country, Angela attempts to reconnect with her sister Jinny. In doing so, they end up discussing their romantic prospects. Jinny muses that she admires the man’s passion, but that she sometimes wishes he was more like Matthew, her childhood love interest who had favored Angela over her. “Matt's got some ideals, too, but he doesn't work them overtime. Anthony's a darling, two darlings, but he's awfully, awfully what-do-you-call- it, ascetic. I shouldn't be at all surprised but what he had a secret canker eating at his heart” (356). Angela seizes on this opportunity and asks her sister if she truly loves

Anthony, receiving a surprisingly ambivalent answer. “Well now, when I get right down to it sometimes I think I do. Sometimes I think I don't. Of course the truth of the matter is, I'd hardly have thought about Anthony or marriage either just now, if I hadn't been so darn lonely” (357). Jinny admits that Anthony has never been her first choice, a thought that sets in motion the somewhat unlikely conclusion of the book’s romantic plot.

Through a combination of her savings and assistance from friends, Angela is able to book passage on a ship to Europe. In the days before she leaves, she decides to visit her childhood home. At first, the trip is an uneventful one, with the one highlight being an interaction with a black resident of Opal Street who misidentifies her as “nothing but

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poor white trash” (364). However, as she is leaving the area, she comes across Matthew

Henson, her childhood friend and the man that Jinny still pines after. After exchanging

pleasantries, Matthew asks if she’d like to have dinner, a chance that Angela warmly

embraces. She springs into action, cooking a feast for him at his house, while

remembering her childhood watching her mother do the same. While the scene might

have started with Matthew’s romantic attentions seeming as if they were focused on

Angela, their conversation reveals a change in his heart. Though he thought of her

affectionately for many years, “I knew then you weren't for me; that fundamentally we

were too far apart. And eventually I got over it...But I went on suffering just the same,

only in another way. I fell in love with Jinny” (369-370). Angela is shocked, but

encourages him to express his affections. Though he fears that it is now too late, she asks

him to write Jinny. Angela is sure to spend the time just before her departure with her

sister. As they discuss her trip, Angela offers Jinny some cryptic advice, “And Jinny,

listen! Life is full of surprises. If a chance for real happiness comes your way don't be

afraid to grasp at it” (373). She is confused, but ultimately agrees to heed her words.

Angela boards the ship after being seen off by the friends who have stood by her

throughout this ordeal, unsure of what awaits her abroad.

As she departs, she receives an uncharacteristically overwrought letter from

Anthony telling her to, “try to forget me, but don't do it! I shall never forget you!” He also pledges to look after Jinny, a promise that seems to arise more out of obligation than out of love. She arrives in Paris and is swept up in all there is to see and do. She meets a friend from Philadelphia by chance and they explore the city together. However, in spite

154 of her companion and her excitement about the city, she finds herself feeling somewhat sad. “There was no chance for actual physical loneliness, yet Angela thought after a few weeks of persistent comradeship that she had never felt so lonely in her life. For the first time in her adventuresome existence she was caught up in a tide of homesickness” (378).

She longs for her sister, her home, her friends, and most of all for Anthony. For a time, she holds out hope that she will hear from Jinny that she and Matthew have reunited, but as the months pass, she begins to lose hope. “Within those six months she lost forever the blind optimism of youth. She did not write Anthony nor did she hear from him” (379). As the holidays approach, Jinny writes to tell her sister to expect a gift from her, “I've looked all over this whole town...to find you something good enough, something absolutely perfect. Anthony's been helping me. And at last I've found it...unless something absolutely unpredictable intervenes, it will be there for you Christmas Eve or possibly the day before. But remember, don't open it until Christmas” (380). Angela waits all day for the gift, but as the hour grows late, she begins to doubt that it will arrive at all. She falls asleep only to be awakened by her maid saying that there is a gentleman to see her at the door. She first tells her to send him away, but then she realized that it was in fact

Christmas. She excitedly runs downstairs and confirms her suspicions. “Grasping a robe and slippers, she half leaped, half fell down the little staircase and plunged into the five foot square drawing-room. Anthony sitting on the tremendously disproportionate tan and maroon sofa rose to meet her” (382). The book ends on an almost cloyingly sweet note as

Anthony quips, “There ought to be a tag on me somewhere...but anyhow Virginia and

Matthew sent me with their love” (382). The book wraps up neatly with the romantic

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mismatches resolved and Angela seemingly removed from the racial strife that

surrounded her in her earlier years.

On the surface, Plum Bun and Black Boy could hardly be more different. One is

fictional while the other is autobiographical. One tells the story of a relatively privileged

life while the other focuses on one in which its protagonist enjoys few, if any, privileges.

However, in spite of these differences, both books are closely aligned in their rhetorical

purpose and thematic focus. Both serve as an interrogation of race and ethics in early

twentieth century America in narrative form, and both offer the possibility of providing

readers with some semblance of a moral education on the subject. Though Angela and

Richard begin their respective narratives in vastly different circumstances, the events of

both books make the characters increasingly aware of the role that privilege and race

impact their lives and learn to respond accordingly.

Perhaps most significant is the role that storytelling plays in their reactions to this

realization. While Richard grows up with an ever-increasing knowledge of how his race

constrains his life and places him in constant danger, he finds solace and a potential for

liberation in the act of telling stories. Even if it may seem like his stories are just his

attempt to “hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo,” the very fact that narrative offers him the opportunity, “to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that knows in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human” is of undeniable importance (384). However unlikely, Richard’s stories have the potential to inform and teach his readers, and perhaps have some small positive impact on the racial politics of

American culture. Similarly, it is an act of storytelling, albeit a private and personal one,

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that ultimately leads to Angela’s recognition of the damage she has caused by passing.

Both books, both fictional and non-fictional, are invested in demonstrating how the injustices of racial discrimination and violence can be explained through storytelling, and these stories often present a kind of argument for a certain system of ethics.

Conventionally, we tend to think less of works of fiction that make these kinds of arguments too forcefully, or that address moral issues in a direct manner. However, when it comes to matters of racial injustice and violence, what do we risk losing as a community of people invested in the role of art in society if we exempt morality from the discourse surrounding race?

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Chapter 4. Religion, Persuasion, and the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

I. Religion, Literature, and Education

The final section of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury takes place on

Easter Sunday. It follows Dilsey, one of the Compson family’s servants, as she attends

church services along with her family and Benji Compson. Notably, the scene places

considerable focus on the sermon itself, presenting much of Reverend Shegog’s homily

in quoted dialog. It follows him as he begins in a more formal introduction to a turn in his

approach as he declares in dialect, “I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!” (295).

Scenes such as this one, that foreground preachers and preaching, occur throughout

American literary history, and critics have offered several theories as to why this is the case. Some, such as Dawn Coleman, assert that this is an attempt by authors to borrow cultural capital from religion, elevating their works by co-opting a trusted cultural institution (197-8). Others, including a more recent wave of critics of religious fiction, argue that they show a current of religiosity running throughout American literary history.44 My focus in this chapter is different. Instead of considering works with a

44 Recently, there has been a small renaissance in studies of Christianity in literature. Jenny Franchot’s ‘Invisible Domain: Religion and American Literary Studies” points out the ‘singularly biased’ approach to scholarship relating to religion. However, she notes that academics in a variety of fields have written excellent cultural histories and critical analyses of religion and religious texts including Jon Butler's Awash 158 religious focus as reflections of the cultural attitude toward religion or ironic attempts to co-opt religious imagery for other purposes, I will be considering these works as engaging in religious didacticism. The sermon itself is a didactic form, and the works I will discuss, James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones and Zora Neale Hurston’s

Jonah’s Gourd Vine, are focused on the preacher and the sermon throughout their duration. Both present preachers as figures with great aesthetic and social power, as individuals who provide both moral education and access to art and culture within communities that might otherwise miss out on it. However, in claiming that these works highlight and celebrate preachers and the sermon, I do not mean to suggest that they do so in a way that is naïve or simplistic. In particular, Hurston offers a complex view of the role religious figures play in a community, which is not always flattering. Hurston and

Weldon Johnson’s works in different ways deploy religious didacticism and foreground the pragmatic value of religion, as well as the central role that a charismatic preacher can play in leading a community.

in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People and Joseph M. Murphy's Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. This isn’t to say there haven’t been excellent works written on the subject of religion and literature in recent years. Gregory S. Jackson’s The Word and Its Witnesses catalogs the theological origins of work such as Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives, and reminds readers that, “unless we understand how those on the ground have interpreted doctrine, responded to it, and passed it along, we cannot fully comprehend how religious points of view shape popular culture, or how spiritual values inform everyday life” (281-2). Similarly useful is David Paul Nord’s work in Faith in Reading, which documents the ways in which the American evangelical movement turned to popular fiction to spread their theological message. In fact, there has been a broader change in attitude toward the topic of religion in literary studies, which Tracy Fessenden characterizes as “the religious turn” in her article “Religion, Literature, and Method.” Arguing against both against a Religious Studies model that takes another discipline as primary, she strongly advocates for the creation of a new methodology that centers religion and religious experience and encourages a more critical view of secularism as a default position. 44 Reynolds’ work in Faith in Fiction is useful here as he concludes his study with a “Chronology of [Religious] Fiction” that includes a significant number of entries up to the 1980s. An updated list would certainly continue to this day given the crossover success of evangelical novels such as The Shack. 159

A complaint leveled by Susan Suleiman and others about didactic fiction is that it

is fundamentally authoritarian in nature. In attempting to use literary texts for the

purposes of education, the author imposes their worldview on the reader, perhaps even

doing so surreptitiously. These works serve to demonstrate that this need not be the case.

Weldon Johnson, by maintaining a considerable amount of critical distance from his

subject and stating his intention to merely represent it faithfully, frames his task as

largely anthropological. Readers may take religious or moral lessons from the sermons,

but the author retains relatively neutral standing. Hurston offers a different, but no less

useful, counter to this vision of the didactic work as manipulative or overbearing, both

presenting the sermon as persuasive and providing enough context to give readers nuance

about the difficulties of religious leadership caused by human imperfection. In both cases,

Hurston and Weldon Johnson manage to demonstrate the range and complexity to be

found in works created within a didactic framework.

II. The Sermonic Voice, Authentic Cultural Expression, and the Utility of Religion

We’ll begin our discussion of African-American didactic religious literature of the twentieth century by examining the poetry of James Weldon Johnson. While Weldon

Johnson is best remembered as the author of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, he led what V. Louise Katainen called, “a varied professional life as poet, lawyer, diplomat, and participant in the Harlem Renaissance” (111). Through his leadership in organizations such as the NAACP, Weldon Johnson established himself as a kind of

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“spokesman for the black intellectual community in the United States,” leading to his eventual pursuit of “an authentic poetic voice not only for himself but also for the emerging African-American poet in the United States” (Katainen 111-2). Weldon

Johnson’s background not only as an artist but as an activist is important. Throughout his career, he just as often seemed to be positioned as an analyst of and an advocate for

African-American culture as he was an active creator of it. Through the introductions he wrote to books such as God’s Trombones and The Book of American Negro Poetry, he established himself as an authority on the cultural history of the African-American people and a critic of the art this community produced.

In the years between 1912 and 1927, a consistent theme in Weldon Johnson’s writing on African-American art is the need for an authentic voice and the failings of poetry written in dialect. The clearest statement given on the topic comes in the introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry, where Johnson celebrates the downfall of dialect in the poetry of the New Negro movement, “The newer Negro poets show a tendency to discard dialect; much of the subject-matter which went into the making of traditional dialect poetry, 'possums, watermelons, etc., they have discarded altogether...They are trying to break away from, not Negro dialect itself, but the limitations on Negro dialect imposed by the fixing effects of long convention” (xxxix-xl).

More specifically, Johnson argues that, “[Negro dialect] it is an instrument with but two full stops, humor and pathos. So even when he confines himself to purely racial themes, the Aframerican poet realizes that there are phases of Negro life in the United States which cannot be treated in the dialect either adequately or artistically” (xl). By depending

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on dialect, forever associated with racist caricatures of African-American life, poets risk

trapping themselves within a limited “racial” artistic space.

It is worth noting that Johnson is far from alone in his suspicion of dialect. In fact, his contribution is only one small part of a conversation within the literary community of the early twentieth century in America about the effect of dialect and “local color.” For example, his concerns were shared by poets including Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten would later claim that Johnson’s poem “The Creation” was responsible for “[breaking] the chain of dialect which bound [them] . . . and free[ing] the younger generation from this dangerous restraint” (qtd. in Carr 12). Richard Wright made his distaste for Zora

Neale Hurston’s use of dialect known in his review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, famously praising her talents as a writer while noting that, “her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.

She exploits that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’ the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race” (Wright 22-23). It is in this context, then, that

Weldon Johnson struggled with the problem of finding what critics have called an

“authentic poetic voice” that avoids the dual pitfalls of oversimplification and pure assimilation. When critics discuss his work, some suggest that he found his authentic voice within the realm of “Standard American English,” rejecting dialect outright.

However, when considering the way Weldon Johnson writes about the sermonic voice of the African-American preacher in the introduction to God’s Trombones, this hardly seems to be the case. He writes that the sermon is not written wholly in dialect nor in

Standard American English. Instead, it is a “fusion of Negro idioms and Bible English;

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and in this there may have been, after all, some kinship with the innate grandiloquence of

their old African tongues” (9). The authentic voice he finds, then, is not a full rejection of

the hegemonic Standard English or the overdetermined dialect, but a fusion of the two,

bound together in the recognizable format of the sermon, an experience that has a

particular weight and cultural capital in the American context that lends his work an even greater sense of legitimacy.

This brief discussion of the role of dialect in Weldon Johnson’s poetry may seem like a diversion from the primary focus of the chapter: discussing the role of religious

didacticism in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. However, the way critics have

discussed the use of dialect in African-American poetry and the way literary critics tend to deal with religious issues and sermonic discourse are, in fact, closely intertwined. In both cases, an element of low culture or folk culture is transposed into a form recognizable as a part of high culture. In doing so, the text gains cultural capital through its association with high culture, but it is treated as if all ties with low or folk culture have been fundamentally severed.

Responses to Johnson’s project in God’s Trombones, and his work more generally, tend to stress the ways in which he finds poetry in African-American folk culture, transcribes these elements into Standard American English, and through the processes of translation, composition, and formatting, transforms what was originally an artifact of religious folk culture into a secular art object. In particular, critics such as

Katainen stress Johnson’s personal agnosticism as a reason for reading these works as examples of secular modernist culture rather than extensions of a religious tradition

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(121). However, the intentions of Johnson’s project or his personal beliefs alone hardly seem reason enough for ignoring one of the practical outcomes of the project itself: the elevation of the African-American folk preacher as a figure of immense rhetorical and social power. Johnson’s larger social project may have been to use art and culture to demonstrate the humanity, skill, and intelligence of the African-American people, essentially an extension of Frederick Douglass’s effort to make his audience, in John

Blassingame’s words, “confront the shocking contradiction of a fluent black man subject to the lash,” updated for the Jim Crow era (qtd. In Selby 327). However, God’s

Trombones itself, when examined as a whole rather than a single part, presents a more pointed case about the value and aesthetic beauty of African-American religious experience.

God’s Trombones is subtitled “Seven Negro Sermons in Verse,” and perhaps appropriately, these sermon-poems have been the primary focus of past critics. However, in addition to the poems themselves, the book consists of a detailed introduction that outlines a brief history of the African-American church—and reiterates Johnson’s theory of authentic poetic voice from The Book of American Negro Poetry—as well as eight illustrations by the artist Aaron Douglas. Anne Carroll has noted how the literary critics who have studied Johnson’s work and the art historians who have studied Douglas’s have tended to separate the two, in spite of their important interplay during the book’s reading experience. Carroll stressed not only the interrelation of image and text, but also of the preface. She notes that because of his earlier descriptions of the experience of attending an African-American church and hearing a folk sermon delivered, “Johnson's readers can

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identify...the beginning of a sermon and can place themselves in the pews, settling in to

listen to the preacher. Without the preface, a reader would not find the situation and

speaker immediately clear” (65). In addition to informing the reader that they will be

reading a sermon, Carroll argues that the illustrations fill out lacking details in these

sermons’ rhetorical situations. “Douglas's illustrations suggest elements of the preachers'

delivery style that cannot be registered in Johnson's poems….His poems can do little, if

anything, to suggest that. Douglas's illustrations fill in this gap” (68). Therefore, if we are

to consider God’s Trombones as a work that attempts to emulate the experience of

attending a church service and hearing a sermon delivered in person, it is essential to take

into account poems, preface, and illustrations together, as they all serve an important

function in the book as a whole.

In the book’s preface, Weldon Johnson describes the African American folk

sermon as an oral tradition that dates back to the pre-colonial period (3). Since this time,

preachers have been delivering versions of well-known sermons with each minister offering their own variations and improvisations. The poems that follow are not transcriptions of specific sermons given by specific preachers on specific days. Rather

they are variations on well-known folk sermons that aspire to capture the cadences of the

folk sermons Weldon Johnson grew up with. In the book’s preface, Weldon Johnson

suggests that, "A good deal has been written on the folk creations of the American Negro:

his music, sacred and secular; his plantation tales, and his dances; but that there are folk

sermons, as well, is a fact that has passed unnoticed" (1). In art, he argues, the

representation of African American preachers has been incomplete, often being portrayed

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as a “semi-comic figure.” In truth, he suggests that the preacher was only rarely comic,

instead holding dual significance as a source of either inspiration and solidarity or a

“narcotic effect” for an oppressed population (2-3). To remedy this, God’s Trombones

seeks to present the sermons in a very particular way. As expected, the sermons are not

presented in dialect, a choice consistent with his earlier writings on the subject. Instead,

he sought to capture both the rhythm and linguistic quality of these sermons. His project,

then, is not one of direct recreation, but rather poetic analogy, attempting to recreate the

spirit of the sermon, if not the entire experience.

While it was not possible through poetry to capture the atmosphere around the

preacher, his gestures, the tone of his voice, or his “physical magnetism,” Weldon

Johnson was able to convey the preacher’s tempo “by the line arrangement of the poems,

and a certain sort of pause that is marked by a quick intaking and an audible expulsion of

breath…indicated by dashes” (10-11). While line breaks serve to give a sense of internal rhythm to the poem’s opening sentence/phrase, the dash technique introduces another kind of pause that can bring a feeling of syncopation to otherwise unremarkable lines.

These two techniques combine to create a sense of tempo and rhythm that effectively

simulate some aspects of the spoken sermon. However, as Weldon Johnson himself

remarks, there are many aspects that contribute to the experience of sitting in the

congregation as a sermon is delivered that a poem alone cannot convey.

Curiously enough, while the African American folk preacher lies at the center of

Weldon Johnson’s project, the text itself says very little about that preacher himself. The

book’s preface mentions Weldon Johnson’s experiences seeing traveling preachers

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deliver sermons in his youth, but at no point does he delve into the specifics of which

denomination these preachers represented or what doctrines for which they advocated (1).

To some extent, this lack of specificity plays into Weldon Johnson’s project, setting up

the preacher as a multi-denominational figure, important to African American religious

practice regardless of sect. However, it also plays into some of the broader caricatures of

African American faith prevalent in American culture. Gregory Carr has noted that the

African American preachers was a common feature of minstrel shows, and argues that the

appearance of the folk preacher in works by white authors often strayed closer to the caricature than the actuality of African American faith (56). If this is the case, it is worth considering if Weldon Johnson’s lack of specificity sets the work up for similar issues.

Carr suggests that it is not, arguing that “Johnson frees the black preacher from the manacles of minstrelsy and liberates him into a three-dimensional reality,” primarily by eschewing dialect as a technique (Carr 56). However, I would like to suggest that it is not the linguistic change that allows Weldon Johnson to circumvent this issue, but instead his specificity, based on his own experience. In the preface to God’s Trombones, Weldon

Johnson writes of his personal experience watching preachers as a child. While he does not put forward a denomination of his own, he does make reference to two preachers:

Black Harry, an African American Methodist preacher of the Second Great Awakening, and Bishop Ashbury, one of the founders of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the

United States. This would suggest, then, that the preacher pictured is drawn from a

Methodist perspective. This kind of specificity is crucial in presenting a good faith representation rather than a shallow caricature.

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God’s Trombones begins in earnest with an unnamed illustration by Aaron

Douglas and the book’s first poem, “Listen Lord: A Prayer.” Douglas’s illustration is a

simple one when compared to those that follow later in the book. It consists of a single

black and white panel centered on a single silhouette that takes up the majority of the

frame. The figure is drawn in profile with its head thrown back and mouth held open, perhaps in exaltation. One arm is raised behind the figure’s head and the other points toward the ground, slightly elevated from a natural, resting position. The figure appears to be bathed in light from above, depicted as five shafts that shade the panel, moving from the darkest on the left to the lightest on the right. The bottom of the panel features several seemingly innocuous details. The base of the panel is black and undulates in a

manner that suggests rolling hills. Two semi-circles bookend the figure on the lower right

and left corners, suggesting spotlights. And two jagged lines emanate from the lower

right corner of the panel.

Each illustration correlates directly with the content of the poem that follows, and this is no exception. The figure looks skyward, opens its mouth to speak, and is met with light in response. “Listen Lord: A Prayer” begins with just this kind of call out to the heavens: “O Lord, we come this morning/Knee-bowed and body-bent/Before thy throne of grace” (13). At first glance, it almost appears that Douglas is being excessively literal in his visual translation of the poem. The figure comes before God, looks in the direction of heaven, and bends his body at an oblique angle while doing so. However, as the poem continues, the contents shift from a simple invocation of a deity or muse. The speaker

168 first makes all efforts to supplicate themselves before the divine, stating that, “We come this morning --/Like empty pitchers to a full fountain,/ With no merits of our own.” We see in this moment the first appearance of Weldon Johnson’s use of dashes to indicate a dramatic pause and sharp intake of breath, and shortly thereafter, he instead begins making requests of God. He first asks only for attention, that God, “lean out far over the battlements of glory,/And listen this morning” before more directly requesting that God ride out on his horse and, “stop poor sinners in their headlong plunge” into the mouth of hell (13-14).

After the poem’s second stanza, the tone and imagery shifts from God making a heroic effort to rescue sinners as they nearly fall into eternal damnation to something more grounded and unsettling. Rather than antiquarian images of battlements and mystical threats like a hellmouth, the speaker instead asks God to turn his attention to

“the man of God” and “And keep him out of the gunshot of the devil” (14). The threat is not only a more modern one, but more immediate as well. While the headlong plunge toward hell is just as deadly, it still offers a better chance of rescue than being in the path of a bullet. This modernized language continues as the speaker requests that God empower this devout individual, asking that the, “Lord, turpentine his imagination,/Put perpetual motion in his arms,/Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power,/Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation,/And set his tongue on fire” (.ibid). The list of requests is curious as it blends both classical sermonic images such as “the tongue on fire” and

“the oil of thy salvation” with practical, modern, and material images such as turpentine and dynamite. In a way, this juxtaposition of the mystical and the mundane, the ancient

169 and the modern, and the material and the spiritual makes the book’s first poem a perfect microcosm of the work as a whole and its project of seeking out and exploiting hybridity, finding common ground amongst unlikely groups and institutions. At first, the poem may not seem to carry with it much of a didactic intention, acting more as a request to the divine rather than a lesson about it, this proves not to be the case on closer examination.

Through the speaker’s invocation of God, the reader learns of the character of this particular brand of faith. They witness the reverence that the speaker has for their deity and become familiar with imagery and concepts that reoccur throughout the practice of the religion itself. While it may seem like an example of a speaker addressing a group of the already converted on its face, decontextualizing the sermon and presenting it in a book of poetry changes the dynamic of “Listen Lord” and imbues it with a distinct didactic quality.

Douglas’s illustration before the second poem in the collection, “The Creation,” is a more complex and more powerful image. It features a silhouette figure viewed in profile again looking skyward, but this time, the figure seems small in comparison to the other features of the illustration. A greyscale rainbow nearly twice the figure’s size stands colossal at its back; a low-slung moon is positioned just to his right with a series of semi- transparent afterimages trailing behind it, showing its descent. The clear focal point of the image, however, is the large hand reaching down from the clouds, drawing the gaze of the figure on the ground. Given the relative size of the hand, taking up nearly half of the panel’s height, it could easily appear threatening or imposing. However, Douglas’s illustration somehow conveys the gentleness of its gesture, a benevolent deity reaching

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out to its creations, be they human or otherwise. The figure looks toward the sky and the

outreached hand and appears to contemplate it, knowing it to be larger, more significant,

and more powerful than it is, but somehow not to be feared.

Critics such as Anne Carroll have noted the significance of Douglas’s illustrations

as providing further context to Johnson’s poems, allowing readers to understand the

visual and physical elements of witnessing a sermon in addition to the aural components that the poems themselves simulate. She writes that Johnson mentions the “gestures and gesticulations” of the preacher in the book’s introduction, but that, “His poems can do little, if anything, to suggest that. Douglas's illustrations fill in this gap, suggesting movement and vitality by arresting figures in motion” (Carroll 68). If this the case though, it is curious that the illustrations very rarely feature a realistic rendering of a church setting or even depict a preacher at all. A survey of Douglas’s illustrations reveals a variety of images, some direct depictions of biblical stories and others more abstract expressions of religious and cultural ideas. They include a figure calling out for God’s attention, a figure witnessing God’s outreached hand, a group of figures surrounded by worldly temptations (including jazz, cards, and money), a winged figure mounted on a horse, Noah directing the building of the ark, Jesus carrying the cross, Moses parting the red sea, and a figure sounding a trumpet surrounded by other wailing figures. The question remains, then, if the illustrations do not provide visual context to the sermon and the preacher’s physical presence, what is their role in the text? Most obviously, they provide thematic accompaniment to the poems themselves. The most literal example of this is the opening poem, “Listen Lord: A Prayer” in which the illustration and poem both

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depict a figure calling out for God’s attention. However, discussions of Douglas’s career

and style by art critics and historians reveal a secondary purpose of their inclusion, and

one that points to the book’s larger project.

Stephanie Fox Knappe, writing about an exhibition of Douglas’s work, described his signature style as, “boldly flattened silhouettes that occupied complexly fractured

spaces and were overlaid with transparent layers of geometric atmosphere. ‘Blackness’—

both in terms of his palette and as a conscious evocation of race—was at its core” (123).

Knappe and other observers of Douglas’s work have discussed the artist’s “emerging

tendency to blend motifs derived from African traditions with European modernist trends,

and to utilize this rich mélange as the foundation for his work” (.ibid). This fusion of

styles can be understood as a product of the time and place in which he worked, Harlem

in the midst of its renaissance, when experimental styles met with a desire to reconnect

with cultural roots.

It is this confluence that Alaine Locke wrote about in his essay “The Legacy of

Ancestral Arts.” In the essay, Locke predicted that, “[The] American Negro...will receive

from African art a profound and galvanizing influence...In the first place, there is in the

mere knowledge of the skill and unique mastery of the arts of the ancestors the valuable

and stimulating realization that the Negro is not a cultural foundling without his own

inheritance.” (137). Locke writes about the influence of African art on European

modernists, seeking something exotic or primitive to appropriate for their own purposes.

In spite of this, Locke suggests that the reintroduction of African art to the American

scene, regardless of how it happened, will remain a boon to African-American artists,

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allowing them to gain a sense of perspective on their aesthetic heritage, arguing that,

“even the present vogue of African art should pass….for the Negro artist they ought still

to have the import and influence of classics in whatever art expression is consciously and

representatively racial” (142).

Subsequently, one of the central drives of the art of the Harlem Renaissance was

to develop artistic styles that drew on African aesthetics while maintaining a touch of the

modern. Weldon Johnson was seemingly fascinated with this search for both aesthetic

originality and an African-American artistic tradition. Michael North has noted that he

was, “fond of asserting the associated claim that white America is in fact merely a copyist

where art is concerned, a parasite on the originality of those it despises and persecutes,”

while simultaneously seeking to develop an authentic voice for black poetry in America

(180). Similarly, W.E.B. DuBois famously argued for the necessity of art that, “is not a

servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall

unswervingly follow Negro ideals” (qtd. in Shelby 64).

This desire to draw from ancestral art while maintaining a focus on the present carries over from Locke’s theory to the practice of both Douglas and Weldon Johnson. In particular, Douglas’s works have been noted as a perfect example of this kind of blending of styles and traditions. Carroll notes that the geometric patterns in the background of many of his drawings in God’s Trombones evoke cubism while the figures themselves are rendered in a fashion that recalls a number of African artistic traditions including

Egyptian tomb paintings and the Dan masks of the Ivory Coast. She argues that, “This mixing of influences was important to Douglas, and it is a key element of his contribution

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to African-American art. He refused to reflect solely African aesthetics in his work, and

his combinations of African or Egyptian and modernist elements in his work allowed him

to develop a distinctive African-American aesthetic” (69). Through this fusion of artistic traditions, Douglas was better able to reflect different facets of the African-American

experience. Taken together, then, both Douglas and Weldon Johnson’s desire for new

forms of artistic expression that are in some ways uniquely “racial” suggest that one of

the goals of God’s Trombones might be to develop a sense of a long-running African and

African-American artistic tradition. By producing a book of poetry based on African-

American folk sermons illustrated in a style that recalls ancient African tomb paintings and ceremonial masks, Douglas and Weldon Johnson create a growing sense of continuity in this artistic tradition and elevate each form referenced to a significant, and perhaps even canonical status. If this is the case, then the truly central form of the folk sermon in the book would suggest that it is perhaps the most important form of African-

American artistic expression at the turn of the century. Further, it would make African-

American aesthetics and religion inseparable in a way that would undermine or at least

complicate narratives of secularization in art and literature, as the church, the preacher,

and the sermon sit at the foundation of an artistic tradition that was coalescing during the

time of the Harlem Renaissance under the direction of artists such as Douglas, Weldon

Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Much has been made of James Weldon Johnson’s personal lack of religious

convictions by critics writing on works like God’s Trombones. Due to the author’s stated

agnosticism, some have suggested that the work itself should be considered more a work

174 of African-American modernist poetry rather than a part of a tradition of religiously inflected literature. This would be a mistake, as we can see from Weldon Johnson’s preface to the book. In the preface, he writes fondly of the African-American folk preacher and his profound aesthetic/rhetorical gifts. In spite of this, he worries that the folk preacher’s moment is quickly passing. As a result, he states his desire to try to “fix something of him” with this book. With this in mind, the book’s religious didactic purpose becomes far clearer. First, in directly presenting the reader with representations of sermons in poetic form, it offers the same kind of textual explication and education on biblical matters that sermons themselves so often do. Even if the reader comes to the book for poetic language, a careful reader will perhaps inadvertently gain some knowledge of both scripture and Christian doctrine as they progress through the book.

Coupled with Douglas’s beautiful, inspirational illustrations, it is not unreasonable to assume that for many readers, the book might appear as an affirmation of or an earnest expression of faith. More directly, however, God’s Trombones offers religious education on the significance of the Christian church in African-American culture and the particular tone and modes of expression of that particular brand of faith. In “fixing” this element of

African-American life for his reader before it passes out of common existence—though some would argue that it has simply changed rather than passed away completely—

Weldon Johnson provides his reader with a form of religious education, just one with a more anthropological, distant intention than the sermon itself. In doing so, his work makes a passionate case for both the rhetorical and artistic power to be found within religious speech and expression and for the historical continuity of African-American art.

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While God’s Trombones is clearly a work deeply invested in the African-

American Christian tradition, whether or not it seeks to teach aspects of that faith to its

readers is less certain. Given Weldon Johnson’s comments in the introduction about his

desire to fix the folk preacher whose time is quickly passing away, it would be reasonable

to assume that the poet’s interest is a purely anthropological one: seeking to document a

set of cultural practices for the purposes of maintaining a consistent record of African-

American cultural history. However, when examined holistically, the didactic project of

God’s Trombones becomes far clearer: each sermon provides the reader with a reminder

of an important function that religion can serve for either an individual or a community.

The fact that these reminders are given in a book of poetry published in a mainstream

literary press, Viking, and framed in Weldon Johnson’s introduction with a kind of

critical distance only serves to reinforce this fact. With a largely secular audience in

mind, then, Weldon Johnson sets out to write a series of poems that encourage a culture

undergoing a rapid secularization to reconsider that process before it is too late.

Perhaps the most powerful example of this comes in “Go Down Death—A

Funeral Sermon,” the fourth poem in the collection. It begins, “Weep not, weep not,/ She

is not dead;/ She’s resting in the bosom of Jesus./ Heart-broken husband -- weep no more;/ Left-lonesome daughter-- weep no more;/ She’s only just gone home” (27). The sentiment is a familiar one to those who have lived among people of faith. When grieving, people can take comfort in the thought that their loved ones are not truly gone, but in a better place with their creator. The poem both personalizes and makes visceral the experience of illness and subsequently casts death as a mercy: “God was looking

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down from his great, high heaven/ Looking down on all hs children, And his eye fell on

Sister Caroline,/ Tossing on her bed of pain./ And God’s big heart was touched with pity,/

With everlasting pity.” (28). In the context of the poem, Death is not a fearful figure, but

a friendly, familiar one who “[takes] her up like a baby” and brings her “Into the

glittering light of glory,” (29). To those already familiar with it, this may seem rote, trite,

or perhaps just commonplace. But to a secular readership, the poem can offer a powerful

example of the importance of religion in the lives of others, even if they do not practice a

religion of their own. It is a useful reminder of the utility of religious experience for the

grieving individual or community. In times of trouble, it provides support and solace, a

function that cannot be dismissed easily.

On closer examination, other poems in the collection serve a similar function,

highlighting a function of religion and teaching a non-religious audience about the

usefulness of faith. “The Prodigal Son” frames the often-repeated parable in terms of its contemporary moment and brings the reader’s attention to the important role that religion can play in forming a moral foundation in a person’s life (21-27). “Let My People Go” retells the story of Moses and provides insight into how shared faith can form solidarity groups and serve as the foundation of resistance of social injustices (45-53). Lastly, “The

Judgment Day” both acknowledges the current imperfection of the world while offering a promise that what is unjust can and will be made to be just one day (53-56). Taken together, these poems provide an array of reasons one might choose to live a life of religious devotion: it provides comfort, it provides a moral foundation, it inspires resistance, and it promises a better, more just world to come. For those of us with a

177 limited experience of religious life, reading God’s Trombones is an education not only in the sermon as a form, but in the good it can provide and the appeals it can make to its audience.

III. The Preacher in Context: Hurston on Community, Morality, and Oratory

This project with a dual purpose, both representing the historical continuity of an

African-American artistic tradition and “fixing” in literature a seemingly transient historical and religious figure, continues in art of the Harlem Renaissance outside of

Weldon Johnson’s work and demonstrates the more general importance of religion in the

African-American artistic tradition. An examination of the correspondence that took place between Weldon Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston shows two authors with similar investments, pursuing projects that run in parallel to one another. Prior to the publication of her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Hurston and Weldon Johnson had corresponded about both of their attempts to represent the African-American preacher as they understood him. On sending Weldon Johnson a copy of her novel, Hurston offered this preface to her fellow author, “I have tried to present a Negro, preacher who is neither funny nor an imitation Puritan ram-rod in pants. Just the human being and poet that he must be to succeed in a Negro pulpit...I mean the common run of us who love magnificence, beauty, poetry and color so much that there can never be too much of it”

(298). Curiously, Hurston’s praise of the folk preacher differs from that offered by

Weldon Johnson in the introduction to God’s Trombones. Rather than simply praising the

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artistry of the preacher, she seems to admire his faults and excesses just as much as his

abilities. “Who does not feel that the ridiculous has been achieved when some one

decorates a decoration. That is my viewpoint. I see a preacher as a man outside of the

pulpit and so far as I am concerned he should be free to follow his bent as other men. He

becomes the voice of the spirit when he ascends the rostrum” (298). This focus on both

the preacher within and outside of the church, faults and all, is a significant departure

from Weldon Johnson’s approach, and one that is central to Hurston’s project in Jonah’s

Gourd Vine. Aside from the tonal accompaniments we see through illustrations by

Douglas, Weldon Johnson’s preachers exist as disembodied voices in abstract, undefined

spaces. They have no lives outside of their time behind the pulpit other than what the

reader imagines for them. Hurston, however, not only is interested in the context of the

sermon, but in the lives these men lead, during which they should be granted a

considerable amount of license to do as they will—a belief that will come out in the text

of her novel. What matters here is that Hurston expands on the appreciation of the folk

preacher shown in Weldon Johnson’s work, which by his own admission came to him

later in life and from a place of pure aesthetic appreciation, to include a more personal

and intimate appreciation of the role of the preacher in a community.

For both Hurston and Weldon Johnson, it was important to represent the sermons

with which they were familiar with honesty. Echoing Weldon Johnson’s concerns about the comic figure of the folk preacher in earlier forms of literature, Hurston rejected suggestions that the preacher of her novel should insert some levity into his sermons. In a letter to Fannie Hurst, Hurston complained of the doubt and condescending suggestions

179 she faced, saying, “Somebody has already suggested that I could have put a little humor into that sermon. I could have done so, but it certainly would have not been true” (292).

The conflict between Hurston’s desire to accurately depict the sermons she had witnessed herself and the expectations of her audience was ongoing throughout the publication cycle of her first novel. John Chamberlain’s review of Jonah in the New York Times complained that, “Miss Hurston is writing poetry and giving us anthropology; her sermon is too good, too brilliantly splashed with poetic imagery, to be the product of any one

Negro preacher” (Chamberlain L17). This same review led the writer to vent her frustrations to Weldon Johnson about the way that white readers and critics impose their perspectives on the works of African American authors. “He means well, I guess, but I never saw such a lack of information about us. It just seems that he is unwilling to believe that a Negro preacher could have so much poetry in him” She remarks that she not only knows a single preacher, but hundreds, who can equal the sermon she transcribed. She laments to Weldon Johnson that the reviewer lacks their deeper knowledge of what it takes to be a great folk preacher, “He must also be an artist. He must be both a poet and an actor of a very high order, and then he must have the voice and figure. He does not realize or is unwilling to admit that the light that shone from GOD'S TROMBONES was handed to you, as was the sermon to me in Jonah's Gourd Vine” (302). The dismissive attitudes encountered by Hurston’s work reflect the commingling of two different kinds of disbelief: the secular critic’s dismissal of the aesthetic and communal value of religious speech and the predominantly white critic’s refusal to believe in the aesthetic virtues of an African-American minister.

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Hurston’s frustrations with the critical response to her debut novel were many and

frequent, one notable example being her response to Lewis Garnett’s write up in the New

York Herald-Tribune, that the author took the somewhat unusual step of writing the critic with an explanation, trying to convey the important role folk preachers play far beyond offering religious guidance alone: “The masses do not read literature, do not visit theatres nor museums of fine arts. The preacher must satisfy their beauty-hunger himself.

He must be a poet and an actor and [sp] posess a body and voice. It is good if at the same time he is of high moral character. But...we forgive a great artist much that would never be forgiven the mediocre” (303). Stating her case more directly, she asserts that, “the greatest poets among us are in our pulpits and the greatest poetry has come out of them. It is merely not set down. It passes from mouth to mouth as in the days of Homer” (303-4).

These comments make it clear that Hurston’s praise of the folk preachers of her youth is

based not on nostalgia, but on a deep aesthetic appreciation. In fact, she credits them for

providing both form and content to her work. Consider, then, the combined burden placed

on the figure of the folk preacher during the Harlem Renaissance by both Weldon

Johnson and Hurston: he must be an artist, a bearer of the ongoing African/American

aesthetic tradition, a moral authority, and a community leader. A closer examination of

Hurston’s first novel will reveal not only the important, if complicated, role that the folk

preacher plays within the community he represents, but how art, religion, and education

are inseparable within it.

While Weldon Johnson’s poetry recreates the religious didactic style of the folk

sermon on the page, Hurston is a bit more expansive in its approach to the same material.

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Rather than focusing on the sermon alone, Jonah’s Gourd Vine is a multigeneric work,

containing within it a number of different didactic projects. It is at once a typological

rewriting of the Old Testament’s book of Jonah, a cautionary tale about the complications

that comes with marital infidelity, a literary representation of the moral education offered

by sermons, and a consideration of the difficulties associated with religious and moral

education itself. Through its protagonist John Buddy Pearson, a sharecropper turned folk

preacher who achieves great success as a minister but struggles to maintain his domestic

life as a result of a string of infidelities, Hurston suggests that it may be possible for a

skilled orator to serve as moral compass to a community in spite of his own ethical

shortcomings. In doing so, her work both asserts the cultural significance of the religious

didactic genre of the sermon and embraces the complexities of elevating this genre during

the early twentieth century.

Like much of Hurston’s fiction, Jonah’s Gourd Vine is set in the American South

in the early twentieth century. On its most basic level, it is a Bildungsroman that follows

John Buddy Pearson, the son of a former slave and a slave owner, who finds that his innate ability with language allows him to both escape the exploitative system of sharecropping that his family finds themselves trapped in and earns him the affections of a number of young women. Throughout John’s life, his linguistic talents propel him into increasingly great positions of authority, becoming first a preacher in a small Florida town, and then becoming a church leader and politician by the book’s end. However, at every turn, his over-active libido threatens both his domestic stability and his position in the community. In order to put the folk preacher into context, Hurston begins with a

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portrait of the folk artist as a young man, and in doing so, works to develop not only an

accurate depiction of the folk sermon itself, but the world around it and the man who

delivers it. This stage of the novel serves both as an examination of the preacher as a

flawed human figure and a cautionary tale about the effects of marital infidelity. The book stakes out a relatively conservative position about the importance of monogamy and illustrates it through the demonstrated negative impact of John’s actions.

The novel opens in the rural Alabama home of Amy and Ned Crittenden,

sharecroppers on land owned by the Pearsons, a family of former slave owners. It

immediately becomes apparent that there is tension between John and his step-father Ned

as a mundane conversation about closing the door is punctuated by threats of violence

and allusions to John’s parentage, “You jes’ do lak Ah say do and keep yo’ mouf shet or

Ah’ll take uh trace chain tuh yuh. Yo’ mammy mought think youse uh lump uh gold

‘cause you got uh li’l’ white folks color in yo’ face, but Ah’ll stomp yo’ guts out and dat

quick! Shet dat door!” (2). The threat of violence is diffused when John’s mother steps in

to correct Ned, saying that John is just as obedient as any of the other children, but that

Ned resents him for the color of his skin and his likely status as a “bastard.” It becomes

clear that John was born before Ned and Amy were married, and his father was a white

man.45 This places him in an unstable, liminal position in the household. His light skin is

seen as both a mark of status and a cause for resentment in his family home. Tensions

escalate as Ned and Amy continue to argue, leading to a physical confrontation between

45 While it is never stated outright, it is heavily implied that John’s father is Mr. Pearson, the slaveholder who had owned Amy Crittenden previously. When John meets Mr. Pearson later in the book, he takes on a semi-paternal role while also keeping John at a distance. John adopts the name Pearson in adulthood, perhaps due to his realization of his father’s identity and the nature of this relationship. 183 the two. Ned attacks Amy with a whip, but being younger and seemingly just as strong,

Amy is able to fight back. Ned responds by catching Amy in a choke hold. His brothers and sisters beg John to intervene as he is the oldest and strongest among them. Only then does he take action, landing a punch on his step father, knocking him unconscious, and releasing his mother from the choke hold. After, his siblings praise John for his strength,

“John Buddy sho is strong! Ah bet he kin whip ev’ry body in Notasulga” (9). After the fight, the tension between John and Ned remains, prompting Amy to instruct John to go into town to ask after work with “Massa” Alf Pearson, a white man who she “knows well.” John sets out, outwardly promising to stay out of trouble while inwardly thinking about all the girls he can meet in town.

At first, this might appear as a simple inciting incident, a conflict that sets John’s journey in motion as he is spurred to leave home to seek his fortune. However, it actually sets the pattern for most of John’s life to come. John finds himself in a precarious situation due to his tendency to stand out from his surroundings, as his light skin and uncertain parentage sets him off from his siblings. While he doesn’t realize it, John’s presence provokes his step-father’s anger which gets directed toward his mother.

However, John only acts when someone else encourages to do so. He intervenes, relying on his innate physical strength (a quality he was born with, not that he worked to develop) and is subsequently praised for it. In the aftermath of the conflict, John is encouraged to flee the situation. Throughout Jonah’s Gourd Vine, John will follow this pattern, relying on his innate qualities, acting only when encouraged by others, and feeling important when the conflict is resolved. At an early age, this isn’t necessarily

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surprising, but as he grows older and the pattern repeats itself, it begins to cause legitimate problems for both John and those around him. Once he has a family that is affected when he flees conflict, what was once a harmless mistake becomes a more troubling flaw in his character.

The pattern repeats itself when he arrives at school and finds himself naturally

gifted with language. When he arrives in town, he quickly meets up with Alf Pearson

who both employs him and encourages to pursue at least some degree of education—at

least until the time comes to work on his plantation (21). Spending part of his time at the

local school, John finds himself mingling with students from a different social class.

While his classmates are all African-American, those coming from families “across the

creek” are generally better off financially, have more access to education, and

subsequently see him as a social inferior. Having never been to school before, John starts

with the basics, and invests himself fully in his work, but not for the reasons readers

might expect. He quickly catches the eye of a young student named Lucy Anne Potts, and

the narrator comments that, “He studied hard because he caught Lucy watching him

every time he recited” (26). Though he was years behind his classmates and though the

school’s uneven schedule due to its connection to the local agricultural industry, John

was driven to advance quickly, practicing reading and writing anywhere and any way he

could: “He found himself spelling out words on barns and wagons, almanacs, horse-

medicine-bottles, wrappingpaper” (27). At this time, he also begins attending church,

where he’s taken by the choir, and particularly Lucy’s place in it. It is in this period of his

life that John’s interest in education, religion, and romance grow together, never to be

185 fully separated until his death. His interest in one drives his interest in the other, and all come together to bring him swift and unexpected success. At first, this connection seems to be an invaluable one that motivates him where he might otherwise focus his attention on playing with his friends or pursuing other romantic options through other means less directly connected to educating and empowering himself. However, in time, it will become clear that John’s reliance on external forms of motivation will ultimately prove destructive as he grows older.

The early section of the novel seems to set John on a straightforward path toward social advancement. Through education and potential marriage into a family of a higher social class, John seems to be on track to escape the poverty of his childhood and build a more stable family through his budding academic talents. Returning to the Pearson planation next season, now able to read and write, John is given more responsibility (49-

50). However, back on the plantation, he soon finds himself tempted by the women around him who seem intent on winning his affections. In spite of these temptations, John and Lucy still meet in church where they sing in the choir together. Given the focus of the book on preaching and sermons, readers might expect that it would be this time and place that John first has his attention captured by the sermon as an art form, but that is not the case. Instead, extended sermons afford John the chance to let his thoughts wander and focus instead on Lucy: “He studied the back of Lucy’s head and shoulders and the way the white rice buttons ran down her back and found plenty to entertain him the whole while” (53). It is a detail that seems to be innocuous at first, but it signals to readers where John’s priorities truly lie.

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In time, John and Lucy marry. He remains faithful to his wife for a time, but he

soon begins having a number of affairs, and he proves to be incapable of keeping it a

secret from those in the community who want to find out. Alf Pearson informs John that

he has heard of his infidelities and advises John to change his ways, suggesting that he’d,

“better keep Big ’Oman out of that Commissary after dark” (85). It’s not only Pearson

who notices. At church, Lucy makes it clear that she knows about his affairs as well. She

asks him directly, “Whut make yuh fool wid scrubs lak Big ’Oman and de rest of ’em?”

and receives a rather unsatisfying response. John asserts that, “Dat’s de brute-beast in me,

but Ah sho aim tuh live clean from dis on if you ’low me one mo’ chance. Don’t tongue-

lash me—jes’ try me and see. Here you done had three younguns fuh me and fixin’ have uh ’nother. Try me Lucy” (88). This aspect of the book has been one that critics have debated for years. Many seem to accept the narrative that there is something primitive and beastly at John’s core that affords him both his charisma and burdens him with his inability to maintain a monogamous relationship. There’s something appealing (if a bit trite) to this notion, that his greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. However, I am inclined to follow the logic of feminist critics such as Genevieve West who suggest that this excuse is less a tragic flaw in John’s character and more of a representation of an unhealthy relationship dynamic founded on patriarchal oppression. John’s innate nature as a man makes him inclined to have as many sexual partners as possible, something that in itself only poses a problem if it has a negative impact on those around him. However, given the initially monogamous nature of their relationship and Lucy’s seeming disinterest in pursuing relations with other partners, the arrangement seems to be a highly

187 uneven one. Things are further complicated by John and Lucy’s decision to have children together, further entangling them. John’s decisions no longer have an effect on him alone, but on his wife and their children. If his affairs destabilize his employment situation or endanger his position in the community, it is not only John who will struggle as a result, but his family as well. This makes the suggestion that he is perpetually on the verge of change and only in need of one more chance to show that he can be the stable provider that his wife wants him to be all the more troubling. Hurston was never known as a revolutionary, and was often in public disagreement with other more radical members of the literary community. In spite of this, it seems difficult to argue that Hurston condoned this kind of dynamic, where Lucy is tasked with perpetually trying to reign in John’s baser impulses while John pushes her away and seemingly ignores their children entirely.

If this is the case, then, I would like to suggest that John and Lucy’s marriage is presented as a kind of cautionary tale. One that demonstrates the struggles that come from an unequal partnership. In doing so, I do not wish to read contemporary values on to the novel itself, or ascribe a belief system separate from Hurston’s worldview as expressed in her essays, letters, and public interviews to the author. Given Hurston’s relatively conservative understanding of marriage and gender, it seems unlikely that the cautionary tale presented here is one against marriage itself. Instead, it seems far more likely that it is a kind of indictment of the kind of unstable family environment depicted in the novel, and that Hurston herself experienced growing up.

John Buddy Pearson bears a number of similarities to the author’s father and her descriptions of him in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston outlines the

188 story of her parents’ marriage in a chapter titled, “My Folks.” John Hurston was also the child of sharecroppers who married a wealthier and more driven woman named Lucy

Ann Potts (7). Like the fictional Potts family, Lucy’s parents resented John’s lower class origins and disowned her as a result (8-9). Hurston’s mother, like her fictional counterpart is described as a strong-willed, bright woman who provided her husband with support and encouragement, the same kind of support and encouragement that she offered to her children. Also like her fictional counterpart, Lucy became ill during the author’s adolescence, leading to the dissolution of their family, with many of the writer’s siblings leaving home to live around the country (King 2). John Hurston also quickly remarried after her passing and gave little attention to the children she left behind (King 3). In this context, the narrative takes on greater significance. Not only is it a coming of age story about an imperfect man excelling at his professional life while letting his domestic life suffer, it is also an exploration of Hurston’s parents’ marriage and the reasons for its dysfunction. Hurston has essentially turned her folklorist’s gaze on her own past. In doing so, she is able to consider the implications of her father’s actions, while maintaining some degree of sympathy towards him.

Around the book’s midpoint, John’s career advances at an incredible rate, at least in terms of the reader’s experience. In the course of ten pages, John goes from working in a lumber camp to being a preacher to being a Moderator in the Baptist leadership.

Diegetically, this happens over the course of years, but to readers, it is a dizzying sequence, and one that focuses almost entirely on John, neglecting nearly every other character. Given the high amount of narrative and temporal compression, we must take

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note of what is highlighted in this time period and what is left behind. John's career is the

focus of this section of the book, and perhaps of the book itself. The book is focalized

through John and his priorities are seemingly determining how readers experience the

events of the book. As a result, we see his growth as a preacher and very little about his

family at all. Lucy appears only in passing to encourage her husband and assure him that

he will soon be “sho' nuff big nigger.” She is given a brief moment to express his

concerns during this time, and it is only through this brief shift in narrative perspective

that we learn that she has had two more children since moving to Florida with John for a

total of seven children. However, we only learn a few of these children's names and even

fewer of them appear for any extended duration in the story itself. This reveals how little

attention our protagonist offers to his wife and family. He has time for his career and his

affairs, but seemingly cares very little for those closest to him. It is a revealing moment,

and one that sets the stage for one of the book's two main didactic elements.

While Jonah's Gourd Vine is often summarized as a story of John's growth as a minister and downfall as a result of his infidelities, it is also importantly the story of a marriage. The early chapters of the book show John falling for Lucy and the young woman inspiring the young man to grow and develop as a person. She leads him to education, religion, and domestic stability. She encourages him to pursue his career once he finds that he is “called to preach.” All the while, she both scolds him for his infidelities for their impact on their family and forgiving him when he promises change.

In time, the unequal distribution of labor and effort in their relationship becomes clear as a result of two key events in the novel. With them, it becomes even clearer that the

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marriage plot of Jonah's Gourd Vine functions as a cautionary tale: a warning to readers

about the importance of both marital fidelity and equal commitment to the long-term well-being of a union and all parties involved.

At the conclusion of this section of the story, John finds himself at a peak in his career, sent to Alabama to accept the position of Moderator with the Southern Baptist

Church. Before leaving, he remarks to Lucy that he, "Wisht ole Ned and Bud could see me now," hoping that his step-father and brother in-law, both of whom had doubted and mistreated him, could see his rise to power (116). He asks Lucy for further validation, declaring that the two “always [made] out Ah wuzn't goin' tuh be nothin'. Ah uh big nigger now. Ain't Ah Lucy?" (.ibid). She assures him that he is, but encourages him to accept the responsibilities that come along with power. John reacts poorly to this suggestion, storming off and ignoring her advice. The gulf between the two continues to grow, and in the meantime, Isis, one of their children falls ill. John had left town to lead a revival, and even the news of his daughter's illness is not enough to bring him home at once. Days later, he arrives home and sees his daughter seemingly on her deathbed. In one of the book's most devastating and revealing scenes, he panics and declares that he can't stay, "Ah can't stand 'round and see mah baby girl die. Lucy! Lucy! God don't love me. Ah got tuh go 'way 'til it's all over. Ah jus' can't stay" (117). John flees to Tampa–

"away from God," according to the narrator, leaving Lucy to stay with their daughter alone until her final moments. While he's away, he meets up with one of his mistresses and "he forgot about the dying Isis" (.ibid).

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John's daughter ultimately survives to both his and Lucy's relief, but the incident is significant for what it can tell us about both the relationship between John and Lucy and John's continued insecurity. In times of trouble, John continues to flee, not only out of a sense of his inability to cope with difficulty, but because of a fear that “God don't love” him. While he has become a “big” presence in the community, he sees this position as a fundamentally unstable one, and perhaps it is this insecurity that is at the root of so much of his “bad behavior.” More significant than this revelation, however, is what it tells us about their marriage: how it functions and why it is ultimately destined to break down. While Lucy provides John with nearly endless support, even of the variety that he resents (offering him suggestions on how to change his conduct in order to solidify his position as a leader with moral authority in the community), he does not provide an equal kind of support in "her" moment of need. Beyond a general absence from the daily labor of childcare, John abandons Lucy in the midst of a family crisis, and especially one of a domestic nature. Curiously, John is not indifferent to his child's suffering. It is actually an excess of emotion that causes him to flee. However, it is notable that his understanding of

Isis's illness is a fundamentally solipsistic one: he doesn't think of the grief of losing a child or the pain that she is experiencing. Instead, he worries that “God don't love” him, that his favored life and his ascent to authority in the church might prove to be short- lived.

It is in this moment that we begin to glimpse the negative effects of John's behavior on Lucy herself. There is an understandable temptation to read John and Lucy's relationship as a reinforcement of the worst aspects of "traditional" gender roles and

192 domestic labor. This could be reinforced by the relatively invisible nature of most of

Lucy's domestic work in the novel. We see her only as she relates directly to John (a result of the book's narrow focalization through its titular character). However, in the context of the criticism John receives throughout the book for being, according to some, less of a "self-made man" and more of a "wife-made man," Lucy's efforts are not going unnoticed, at least not in the community at large. John's parishioners, constituents, and community members are well aware that John's position is only enabled by his wife's constant work and support. If she were to be removed from the equation, his situation would likely change drastically.

Shortly thereafter, this hypothesis is tested as Lucy falls ill. While John was previously able to ignore the domestic operations of their household which Lucy handled in a manner that was both graceful and entirely invisible to him, her inability to perform this labor ultimately makes it visible to both John and the reader. As Lucy lies sick in bed, it is her nine-year-old daughter Isis who takes on the brunt of her duties, and Lucy shows her appreciation, saying, “Thankee, Isie. Youse mah chile ‘bove all de rest” (127).

When John finally arrives, he does so with less sadness than shame, as the narrator notes his downcast gaze while approaching his wife. She scolds him for his inattention during her illness. John lashes out, “Oh you sick, sick, sick! Ah hates tuh be ‘round folks always complainin’, and then again you always doggin’ me ‘bout sumpin’. Ah gits sick and tired uh hearing it!” (128). Soon, the subtext of their conversation becomes text as focus shifts from the illness itself to John’s infidelities as Lucy accuses him of being away with his mistress while she lies on her deathbed. John denies the charge, but Lucy refuses to drop

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the matter, telling him that, “Big talk ain’t changin’ whut you doin’. You can’t clean

yo’self wid yo’ tongue lak uh cat” (128-9). Immediately following this comment, John strikes Lucy. However, the narrator’s choice of words in describing the act is a curious one. After Lucy’s words, the next line reads, “There was a resounding smack. Lucy covered her face with her hand, and John drew back in a sort of horror, and instantly strove to remove the brand from his soul by words,” noting that he told her to be quiet

(129). Both John and the narrator appear to be taking part in an all-too-common process

of shifting blame for incidents of domestic violence. Rather than apologizing for his

actions, John notes that he gave Lucy an instruction that she failed to follow. Meanwhile,

the narrator both chooses a passive verb to describe the act itself, saying that there “was a

resounding smack,” and removes John from the sentence entirely.46 These choices in

narration are a part of a long-standing tradition in both fiction and reportage concerning

how we choose to narrate domestic violence. Psychologists Alexandra Frazer and

Michelle Miller have written on the tendency to reflect the normalization of domestic

violence and the shifting of blame to victims through the use of passive verb tenses.

“When describing violent acts, writers and speakers make choices about sentence

structure that may reveal their underlying beliefs about these acts...Particularly revealing

is whether the writer chooses an active or passive verb” (Frazer and Miller 62). In this

moment, the narrator’s choice to remove John’s agency from the sentence is doubly

revealing, both reflecting the ways that the language our culture uses to describe acts of

46 Readers may interpret this choice of verb tense in multiple ways. Some may see it as a purposeful deflection of responsibility for John. Others may choose to read it as an example of free indirect discourse, in which the narration reflects John’s own desire to distance himself from the situation. 194

domestic violence removes blame from the abuser and shows how the book’s focalization

through John extends to the narration itself. We not only experience only those events

that are important to John, the narrative surrounding those events “takes John’s side,” to

use a rather crude phase.

Soon afterward, Lucy passes away, seemingly from a combination of her illness

and John’s neglect. Though the story continues long after Lucy’s death, chronicling his

subsequent marriages and continued struggles with family life, it is his relationship with

Lucy that is the most telling in terms of the book’s didactic project related to marriage.

After Lucy’s death, John struggles to find the same kind of support from his next wives

and his friends. It is only after she is gone that John comes to realize how central she was to his professional success. It’s a bit of a trite lesson to learn about marriage, but one that falls closely in line with the book’s biblical basis in the book of Jonah, a story that I’ll outline in some detail below.

The book begins as God speaks to Jonah, telling him to travel to the city of

Nineveh and, “cry against it,” or more directly, to inform the people there of their

“wickedness” (King James Bible, Jon. 1.2). Jonah initially resists the call and flees, boarding a ship to the city of Tarshish. While the ship is at sea, God commands a tempest, seemingly to sink the ship. Knowing that God was seeking vengeance against

Jonah, the sailors cast Jonah into the sea to save themselves from the storm. Jonah is subsequently devoured by a large fish, and remains “in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (King James Bible, Jon. 1.3-17). Jonah pleads for God’s forgiveness and is soon expelled from the fish’s body. God again commands Jonah to travel to

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Nineveh. This time, Jonah complies, travelling to the great city and warning those who

live there of God’s displeasure with them. The people soon repent, laying down their

finery and calling out for God’s forgiveness. Subsequently, “God saw their works, that

they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he

would do unto them; and he did it not” (King James Bible, Jon. 3.1-10). Curiously, Jonah is angered after he learns of God’s forgiveness. He claims that the reason he fled is that he, “knew that thou art a gracious God, and a merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of evil” (King James Bible, Jon. 4.2). Frustrated, he leaves the city and sits to watch what would become of the city. As he sits, it grows hot, and

God grows a gourd vine to provide him shade. Jonah is initially thankful, but again grows angry as God sends a worm that “smote the gourd that it withered” (King James Bible,

Jon. 4.7). God scolds him for his outburst, saying, “Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night.” God then asks Jonah if he should not spare Nineveh as many people live there who “cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand” (King James

Bible, Jon. 4.9-11). While the novel is quite different in both plot, setting and characters, the book’s title has led a number of critics to read John Buddy Pearson as a typological figure based on the biblical Jonah.47 The specifics of the typological reading vary from critic to critic, but in general, John stands in for Jonah as an imperfect vessel by which

47 Among the critics that discuss John as a version of Jonah, Genevieve West’s feminist reading of the novel offers one of the most compelling attempts to map the biblical story onto Hurston’s text. She argues that John stands in for Jonah while his wife Lucy plays the part of the gourd vine, sent by God to provide him with shelter and support. As John does little to sustain his wife, and actively works to undermine her, he contributes to her untimely death (511). 196

the word of God might be delivered who often takes for granted gifts given to him the he

did not labor for.

Most relevant to the novel’s cautionary tale on marriage and fidelity, however, is

the suggestion that Lucy acts as the gourd vine to John’s Jonah. Feminist critics such as

Genevieve West have long suggested that John’s lack of appreciation for his wife’s

support is key to understanding the book from a typological perspective. John accepts

Lucy’s shelter and support and fails to appreciate her until she withers away. He only

then realizes that he, like Jonah, had not labored for her sake, or encouraged her growth.

West takes the book’s retelling of the Book of Jonah as a feminist commentary on the

institution of marriage, and on the hegemonic system of gender roles that serves as its

basis. However, another reading seems more likely: that the book serves as a didactic

moral lesson about the importance of monogamy and fidelity in a marriage. As critics, we

may be tempted to push back on this idea as the suggestion seems a bit antiquated, and

does not hold with our desire to advocate for literature as a subversive force in in the world. We hope that literature can act as a cultural inspiration for the dismantling of

gender roles and the unsettling of norms of relationships. It can certainly do these things,

however, it is not the default setting of any kind of fiction. There are works good and bad

that advocate for or against institutions that we might see as outdated or harmful. As

critics and literary historians, it is our responsibility to engage with the texts we

encounter honestly, reading them for the textual elements we can locate within them, not

those that we hope we can justify to ourselves. In its own way, the story of John and

Lucy’s marriage teaches its reader about the supposed importance of marital fidelity,

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which is a core component of the Christian faith, and subsequently contributes to the

book’s identity as a novel that takes part in a kind of religious didacticism. However, the

novel also more directly engages in a project parallel to Weldon Johnson’s: it focuses on

the African-American folk preacher as a source of religious and moral education through

John’s rise to prominence in the Southern Baptist church.

Throughout the novel, Hurston alludes to John’s charisma and natural ability with

language as one of his greatest assets. It is what brings him together with Lucy and what sets off his rise to prominence in the community. However, we only occasionally glimpse

John behind the altar in the book, hearing of his oratorical skills second-hand for the most

part. This changes toward the final section of the book as a sermon takes on added

significance to the narrative. John’s seemingly immoral behavior leads to some questions

about his moral leadership among the parishioners. He finally takes Lucy’s advice earlier

in the book and gives “a sermon of himself,” reminding them of both his imperfections

and his better qualities. Unlike the earlier sermons in the novel, this one is presented in

full, appearing first as quoted dialog within a paragraph before breaking from the

established narrative structure of the novel and appearing in a format akin to poetry. In

fact, it is a style strikingly similar, both in style and subject matter, to Weldon Johnson’s

in God’s Trombones, a fact that hardly seems like a coincidence given the

correspondence between the two authors.

The extended sermon stands out from the rest of the text of Jonah’s Gourd Vine in

both form and content, and it is appropriate that it does given its prior publication history.

The sermon as presented in the novel is nearly a direct copy of a sermon Hurston

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recorded during her field research as a folklorist, one credited to Reverend C.C. Lovelace

of Eau Gallie, Florida on May 3, 1929. Hurston transcribed Lovelace’s homily and in

1934, she submitted the text of Lovelace’s sermon along with several other essays on

African American folk culture to Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology. Hurston minimizes

her involvement with the production of the poetic sermon, stating that she–and Weldon

Johnson by extension–had these works “handed” to her. However, given the poetic

tradition of the found poem, in which everyday language is arranged into poetry, it would

seem that Hurston sells herself somewhat short with this description.

We will start by considering the sermon as it appeared in the anthology, devoid of

narrative context. Hurston’s transcription of Lovelace’s sermon begins as quoted dialog,

marked in the text as a spoken introduction before the sermon proper begins. In keeping

with the style established by Weldon Johnson, the introduction is written in “Standard

American English,” without even the smallest suggestion of dialect entering into the

pastor’s diction until the sermon itself begins. Lovelace opens his homily plainly,

introducing the theme on which he will be speaking, “Our theme this morning is the

wounds of Jesus,” before quoting a passage from scripture that he will then go on to

interpret for his congregation, “When the father shall ast (sp), ‘What are these wounds in

thine hand?’ He shall answer, ‘Those are they with which I was wounded in the house of

my friends’” (50).48 Lovelace builds on this quotation, referencing another from the book of Isaiah that suggests that Jesus’s wounds are the result of humanity’s

48 Hurston has helpfully included an in-text citation, noting that the quoted passage comes from the thirteenth chapter of the Book of Zechariah, verse six. 199

transgressions, and further supports this idea with a reference to the works of the apostle

Peter who, “affirms that His blood was spilt from before the foundation of the world”

(Ibid.). He then turns his attention to his own experience, noting that in his life, those he

has seen wounded have been gamblers, thieves, robbers, and law-breakers, “each one had a reason for his wounds,” ranging from carelessness to malice. Regardless of the cause, however, Lovelace asserts that “all wounds disfigure a person” (Ibid.). It is at this point that Lovelace’s sermon begins in earnest, returning to the initial concept of the wounds of

Jesus, and raising a rhetorical question. If the wounds visited upon a person generally happen for a reason, why is it that Jesus was wounded? Lovelace reasons primarily through his interpretation of the text:

Now a man usually gets wounded in the midst of his enemies; but this man was wounded, says in the text, in the house of His friends. It is not your enemies that harm you all the time. Watch that close friend. Every believer in Christ is considered His friend, and every sin we commit is a wound to Jesus. The blues we play in our homes is a club to beat up Jesus; and these social card parties…” (50)

Here, Lovelace begins building his argument, primarily based on logos. He starts from

the text, bringing to bear his own experience with the wounds he has seen in his life, and reasons that Jesus’s wounds are the result of human sin. With this logical base established, however, he then switches his approach. While the wounds mentioned in scripture remain ambiguous, Lovelace attempts to give them a clearer form through his reference to blues as a “club to beat up Jesus.” No longer are these wounds uncertain in shape or severity, instead they are linked with a physical act, turning the abstract sin into a visceral experience of violence.

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With this image established, Lovelace changes his approach. The ellipsis that

concludes the paragraph signals a shift in the sermon, moving from the introduction,

written as prose, to the sermon itself, written as poetry. The shift is also a linguistic one,

as Lovelace switches codes, slowing introducing phrases and flourishes of dialect into his

speech. In the transitional moments, Lovelace truly appears to be speaking in the style

described by Weldon Johnson in the introduction to God’s Trombones, “a fusion of

Negro idioms and Bible English” (9). While Weldon Johnson rejected the use of dialect in his own poetry, believing that it could only be read as an attempt at humor or pathos for the average reader, Hurston seems to successfully avoid this pitfall in her representation of Lovelace’s speech. The result is not comic or pathetic. Rather, it lends the text a feeling of growing momentum. Where the prose introduction relies on the careful building of a logical framework, arguing for a particular ethical standard of behavior through textual evidence from the Christian Bible, the poetic sermon shifts its focus toward aesthetic and emotional appeals.

The change is a relatively gradual one, however, as the sermon’s second section begins with a long line that mirrors the structure of the previous paragraphs. The final paragraph of the prose introduction begins, “Jesus was not unthoughtful,” a construction that is echoed in the first line of the poetic section, “Jesus have always loved us from the foundation of the world” (51). This longer line calls back to the quotation from Peter in the prose introduction, and sets up the preacher’s retelling of the creation story in subsequent lines:

“Jesus have always loved us from the foundation of the world When God 201

Stood out on the apex of His power Before the hammers of creation Fell upon the anvils of Time and hammered out the ribs of the earth” (Ibid.).

The alternating line lengths serve to transition from one mode of speech to another and suggest a sense of rhythm, as the shorter lines are followed by negative space, suggesting dramatic pauses. This negative space also serves a thematic purpose, however, as the image Lovelace is describing is God standing “on the apex of His power,” about to create the Earth from nothingness. The blank space is a clear parallel to the blank “canvas” facing the creator before he takes action. In the following lines, that blank space is replaced by words describing the creation itself, “Before the hammers of creation/Fell upon the anvils of Time and hammered out the ribs of the earth” (Ibid.). Lovelace chooses to return to the creation story to suggest that God’s love for humanity predates creation itself. In spite of the warnings from “the elders” that humans were bound to be imperfect and would inevitably sin against God, he chooses to make them anyway. This defiant act of unconditional love is followed by a promise, “If he sin, I will redeem him/

I’ll break de chasm of hell/ Where de fire’s never quenched/ I’ll go into de grave/ Where de worm never dies, Ah!” (Ibid.).

As Lovelace moves from his more measured introduction into the more performative sermon, Hurston makes an effort to capture the non-linguistic aspects of his presentation. Weldon Johnson noted a common feature of the folk preacher’s style, a quick exhalation that he noted through a set of dashes. Here, Hurston attempts to capture something similar, only through the use of the exclamations, “ha” and “ah” which occur throughout the sermon. As the preacher’s energy grows, Hurston notes the increasingly

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energetic nature of his delivery through punctuation. Throughout the introduction,

sentences conclude uniformly with periods, a pattern that continues into the poetic

sermon. However, several lines in, we see the first use of an exclamation point, “When

God said, ha!,” and shortly afterwards, even a double exclamation point, “Christ, yo’

friend said/ Father!! Ha-aa!” (51). These changes add up to a feeling of building

momentum as the preacher becomes less restrained and more animated in his style, in

spite of the grave subject matter being discussed. It is also in this section that we see a

sharp increase in his use of dialect. While the spoken introduction is written primarily in

“Standard American English” with only a few small deviations in grammar or sentence

structure, the poetic sermon incorporates vernacular touches as it goes forward. “The”

becomes “de,” Christ is referred to as “yo’ friend,” and the letter “g” is frequently

dropped at the end of words. Doing so serves to personalize and in a way, update the

creation story. God, Jesus, and other speakers, in spite of their mythical and historical

distance from the text’s present moment, use language in a manner that is familiar to the

sermon’s assumed audience. Though they are separate from humanity, this use of

language humanizes them, even as they debate the deeply flawed nature of humanity

itself. Even the moment of creation itself is described in relatively non-elevated terms.

“So God A’mighty, ha!/ Got His stuff together/ He dipped some water out of de mighty deep/ He got Him a handful of dirt, ha!/ From de foundation sills of de earth/ He seized a thimble full of breath, ha!/ From de drums of de wind, ha!/ God my master!/ Now I’m ready to make man/ Ah-aah!” (51).

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Notably, the sermon takes a substantial detour from its original topic, the wounds of Jesus, to tell the story of creation. After telling the story of how humans and the earth were made in some detail, Lovelace progresses quickly through the early Christian history of the world, skipping directly to the Last Supper, allowing him to return to the original topic. “As He gazed upon His friends, ha!/ His eyes flowing wid tears, ha!/ “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful unto death, ha!/ For this night, ha!/ One of you shall betray me, ha!/ It were not a Roman officer, ha!....But one of you/ Who I have choosen my bosom friend/ That sops in the dish with me shall betray me” (52). Strangely, Lovelace does not take the opportunity here to note that the Last Supper is the scene that inspired the sermon’s first quotation about Jesus being wounded in the house of his friends.

Instead, he elects to “draw a parable.” The basis of this parable is an extended description of Jesus returning to earth, taking on a human form, and “grab[ing] de throttle/ Of de well ordered train of mercy” (Ibid). This image, of Jesus at the controls of the train of mercy is a central portion of a common folk sermon, referenced by Weldon Johnson in the introduction to God’s Trombones. However, rather than staying with this image for an extended period of time, Lovelace again changes course, turning back to his brief retelling of the New Testament. He pictures Jesus walking the streets with his disciples, saving them from a raging storm at sea, and brought before Pontius Pilate wearing a

“crown of 72 wounds upon His head” before ultimately being crucified (52-53). In this moment, Lovelace’s sermon reads less like a parable and more like a digest version of the

Bible itself. This summary is followed by a series of images taken from the Book of

Revelations: Jesus on a white horse, flaming swords, and copious amounts of fire and

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judgement. These apocalyptic images constitute the conclusion of Jesus’s story, or at

least the portion of it that exists as prophesy, as these events have yet to take place at the

time of writing. Having reached the end of Jesus’s story, and of time itself, Lovelace is

then free to return to his parable of the trains.

The train as pictured at the sermon’s end is quite different. Instead, of a holy train driven by Jesus himself, Lovelace, “heard de whistle of de damnation train/ Dat pulled out from the Garden of Eden loaded wid cargo goin to hell/ Ran at break-neck speed all de way thru de law/ All de way thru de prophetic age/ All de way thru de reign of kings and judges—“ (54). The implication here is that sin and its consequence, damnation, have been humanity’s inevitable fate since the time of the creation of man. The track has been laid, and it would continue in that direction, unless something drastic was done to stop it.

Lovelace describes just that, “Jesus stood out on her track like a rough-backed mountain/

And she threw her cow-catcher in His side and His blood ditched de train,/ He died for

our sins./ Wounded in the house of His friends./ Thats where I got off de damnation train/

And dats where you must get off, ha!” (Ibid.). Here he returns to the initial premise of the

sermon, and connects the train image to it. Human sin is inevitable, and results in a

wounding that disfigures Jesus, however, it affords the believer the opportunity to

disembark from the “damnation train” and perhaps to board its counterpart. It seems,

then, that the significance of the sermon is not so much that the congregation is meant to

avoid wounding Jesus, as in Lovelace’s formulation, it almost seems inevitable, but that

they appreciate the opportunity that these wounds afford them, and take advantage of it

when it arrives.

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I present Lovelace’s sermon in detail as it serves as the basis for the climactic

moment of Jonah’s Gourd Vine. John’s version of the train sermon maintains a surprising amount of the original text of Lovelace’s homily. By the novel’s conclusion, John Buddy

Pearson has been the subject of numerous scandals in his parish—most notably, that he has been unfaithful to his wives and neglectful toward his children. These allegations brought by his parishioners have led a group of church elders to call for his removal. The prominence of this sermon in the text is notable as it is written out on the page in full.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between how John Buddy Pearson’s sermon

differs from the version delivered by Lovelace is that it is surrounded on both sides by a

novelistic representation of reality. The sermon-poems of God’s Trombones and

Hurston’s transcription of Lovelace’s sermon sit in isolation, and as a result, they

ultimately lack context. In the introduction to his book of poetry, Weldon Johnson

expressed regret that he was unable to recreate the atmosphere of the service and the

personality of the preacher, “his gestures, his physical magnetism, his changes in

tempo…the tones of his voice” (10). Through the novel itself, Hurston has given her

reader just that. They have come to know John Pearson over the course of the story, and

through her narrator, they can get a better sense of the context in which he delivers the

sermon. In the moments leading up to the sermon, Hurston takes care to lead up to it,

representing other aspects of the church service. She describes the way “the sunlight

filtered thru the colored glass on the packed and hushed church,” the clothes the members

of the congregation worse, and the flowers set out to decorate the Communion table. In

doing so, she not only sets the scene for the story she is telling, but she also manages to

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clarify the rhetorical situation in which John makes his case, both for his own

employment, and for the moral behavior of his congregation.

The tone of the proceedings is set in part by the hymn sung at the start of the service, a prelude to the sermon John will deliver. At first, he considers preaching on the

Last Supper, but thinks better of it. Instead, he leads the group in a hymn that highlights human imperfections: “Beloved, Beloved, now we are the sons of God/ And it doth not yet appear what we shall be/ But we know, but we know/ When he shall appear, when He shall appear/ We shall be like Him/ We shall see Him as He is” (174). The words of the hymn suggest that the congregation, and by extension its pastor, is made up of “the sons of God” who may not be deserving of that title by the merit of their actions. In spite of this imperfection, the hymn states that “when He shall appear/ We shall be like him,” implying that there is a chance for salvation in the future. Thematically, this parallels the topic of the train sermon, which covers the way in which human moral failures serve to wound Jesus, but that those same wounds may offer the chance at salvation.

Once the song concludes, John addresses the congregation as friends, “Brothers and Sisters: De song we jus’ sung, and seein’ so many uh y’all out here tuh day, it reaches me in uh most particular manner…Ahm gointer speak tuh yeh outa de fullness uh mah heart. Ah want yeh tuh pray wid me whilst Ah break de bread uh life fud de nourishment uh yo’ souls” (174). This informal introduction remains a part of the conventional paragraph structure, consistent with what came before. It is not entirely different from the prose prelude that precedes Lovelace’s sermon. However, it is worth noting that while Lovelace spoke entirely in “Standard American English” before the

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poetic sermon began, John’s sermon introduction is presented in alternating codes, first in

dialect before moving into more formal language as he moves beyond greeting his

congregation into taking on his elevated role as Biblical educator and interpreter: “We

read in the 53rd Chapter of Isaiah where He was wounded for our transgressions and

bruised for our iniquities, and the apostle Peter affirms that His blood was spilt from

before the foundation of the world” (.ibid). John’s strategic use of code switching creates

a sense of his dual roles in the community. He is at once a member of the congregation

and elevated above it through his understanding of scripture and his eloquent

explanations of it. John’s spoken introduction is identical to the one offered by Lovelace,

without a few punctuation marks differing between the two versions. However, one major

change that takes place is the gradual shift in his mode of address. Where Lovelace’s

sermon is divided by two subheadings into an “Introduction” and “The Sermon,” John’s

transition is much smoother.

For the first five paragraphs of the sermon, his address continues in conventional

paragraph structure. With the start of the sixth, however, the words on the page take on a

different shape entirely, introducing a series of irregular line breaks, as seen in Weldon

Johnson’s work and Lovelace’s anthologized sermon: “Jesus have always loved us from

the foundation of the world/ When God/ Stood out on the apex of His power/ Before the

hammers of creation/ Fell upon the anvils of Time and hammered out the ribs of the/

earth” (175).49 As previously explained, much of John’s sermon is taken directly from

49 These lines, like the spoken introduction, are identical to their counterparts in the Negro anthology. However, Hurston has made some subtle adjustments to the line breaks, including the decision to place the final syllable of the stanza, “earth,” in a line of its own. 208

the version of the train sermon delivered by Lovelace, with only a few small changes in

phrasing and line breaks. However, in the context of the novel itself, it takes on additional

layers of meaning, both as a kind of moral instruction and, as some critics have

suggested, as a persuasive appeal for leniency for our protagonist’s own transgressions.

When presented as a part of the Negro anthology, Lovelace’s sermon, while

beautifully written, expresses relatively familiar ideas about faith, sin, and redemption.

Jesus is “wounded in the house of his friends” each time that a sin great or small is

committed. However, Jesus’s sacrifice and rebirth offers believes the chance to

disembark from the damnation train and instead begin the journey on a track toward

everlasting life, in spite of their past transgressions. These kind of ideas, of sin and

redemption, form the core of Christian belief, in which proper conduct is taught and

policed. Lapses in behavior are generally forgiven as long as they are not too severe and

devotion to the faith remains strong.50 However, after the events of the novel, the sermon takes on an additional meaning. While Lovelace appears to be making an appeal to his congregation to make changes to their sinful conduct, their ungodly music and card playing serving as just two examples, John Buddy Pearson is speaking from personal experience, not only as an interpreter of the Bible, but as a sinner himself. He too had

“wounded Jesus” through his infidelity, his drinking, and his neglect of his family.

However, he states confidently at the sermon’s mid-point that he “got off the damnation train.” Notably, he states this in the present tense, not claiming some future salvation, but

50 The attitude toward the moral conduct of members of the Christian faith has been one of the central sources of theological debate over the religion’s history. The primary divide exists between Roman Catholic and Protestant groups, with the former believing that a combination of faith and “good works” are required in order to achieve salvation and the latter believing that salvation comes through faith alone. 209

a salvation past. He has already changed his ways and has already been forgiven. As a

result, he makes an appeal to his congregation to not only alter their conduct, but to see

him as reformed, as worthy of his position, and oddly as a model of how a flawed person

can be redeemed. His past misconduct and the public knowledge of it, adds an additional

charge to the speech’s rhetorical situation and in fact bolsters his ability to appeal to the

congregation and makes the didactic element of the sermon all the more powerful. As one

who has sinned greatly and ultimately recovered from it, John transforms his life into a

“teachable moment” about the nearly boundless opportunities afforded for forgiveness in

the Christian faith. To all those in the audience who think that they may be beyond

redemption, John offers proof through his own life and his position in the church that

they are not. Presented in context, John’s sermon is powerful and moving. It inspires not

only a respect for the aesthetic prowess of the speaker, but for the religious and moral

systems animating him. Though readers have spent the majority of the novel learning of

John’s imperfections, in this moment, he is at once an instrument of God, a leader of his community, and a deeply flawed man. The fact that the sermon’s impact is not lessened by his misdeed is a testament to both its rhetorical power and the complexity of Hurston’s vision, capable of revering this man without idealizing him.

Works like Hurston’s and Weldon Johnson’s demonstrate the continued necessity

of paying careful attention to the role that religion plays in the art of the early twentieth

century and the ways in which that art might teach its reader something from a

religiously-inflected perspective. Works by both authors demonstrate the unique duality

of sermonic speech: it is at once poetic and literary while also providing a practical utility

210 in the form of moral leadership to community members as well as practical education how one should live. This duality extends to literary representations of sermonic speech: readers can appreciate them both as aesthetically beautiful and find them useful as a means of religious education and insight. It is worth noting that my goal in this chapter is not to encourage a kind of uncritical appreciation of American religious culture, and specifically American Christianity. While I may be advocating for a more earnest reading of literature as expressing the faith of its characters and reflecting the prevailing religious sentiments of the culture it emerges from, the goal of this way of reading is to provide a better critical interpretation of how religious thought fits into American life and letters.

Much has been made of both Hurston and Weldon Johnson’s ambivalent relationship with religion, with Hurston keeping many cultural traditions at arm’s length through her folkloric approach and Weldon Johnson rarely shying away from making his agnosticism known. This might lead some readers to question my decision to argue that these texts be seen as fictional versions of earnest religious expression and education.

However, it is precisely this critical distance and personal skepticism that draws me, as a skeptical reader, to these works. Knowledge of their author’s lack of religious devotion only makes their representations of the role that faith and religious institutions play in the lives of characters that much more powerful. The fact that this power is intermingled with complicating factors such as the fallibility of the individuals who make up these institutions does not invalidates them. Rather, it modernizes them, embracing both complexity and religion in a way that is neither naive nor dismissive.

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Much that has been written about didactic fiction concerns the authoritarian tendencies of these fictions, a concern that stems from an assumption that those writing seek to indoctrinate or dominate their reader into a worldview that the author holds steadfastly. Weldon Johnson’s distance and Hurston’s contextual ambivalence demonstrate how didactic works can circumvent these concerns. By both educating readers on religious issues and representing much of the context that complicates the practical reality of religious life, these works manage to educate without manipulating or condescending to their reader. It is precisely this approach that is needed as we pursue recovery projects like this one. Study of religious or didactic works does not mean that we must accept their represented lessons or doctrine uncritically. Instead, it simply means that we must make an earnest attempt to record as full of a possible range of ideological perspectives, even those we may personally find to be inaccurate or distasteful, as we write our accounts of literary history. In doing so, we can only broaden our perspective on the extant cultural landscape.

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