White Feminist Blues: Reading and Teaching Toni Morrison's Jazz As Part of the De-Centered Majority Tracy Colleen Anderson Iowa State University

Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1995 White feminist blues: reading and teaching Toni Morrison's Jazz as part of the de-centered majority Tracy Colleen Anderson Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Anderson, Tracy Colleen, "White feminist blues: reading and teaching Toni Morrison's Jazz as part of the de-centered majority" (1995). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 7075. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/7075 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. White feminist blues: Reading and teaching Toni Morrison's Jazz as part of the de-centered majority by Tracy Colleen Anderson A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department: English Major English (Literature) Signatures have been redacted for privacy Iowa state University Ames, Iowa 1995 11 DEDICATION In memory of Dorothy Seward Anderson, my grandmother Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1. WHITE READERS/BLACK TEXTS: 6 WHAT DON'T WHITE FEMINISTS UNDERSTAND? The Question of Representation; 19 Resisting the Oppressive Melting Pot CHAPTER 2. MORRISON'S/AZZ; REVISING FORM 32 AND RESINGING HISTORY History from the Narrative Margin 33 Textual Improvisation: A Path of Response, Participation and Healing 43 That Enigmatic Narrator. A Critical Conversation 60 Brutal Love and Other Perplexing Paradoxes 68 The Healing of People through a Search for the Maternal 72 A Sense of Unending 82 CHAPTER 3. READYMADE FOR...READER-RESPONSE 88 + WHITE FEMINISM + BLACK FEMINISM IV CHAPTER 4. JAZZING UP THE LOCAL CURRICULUM: 103 DISCUSSINGJAZZ WITH CAUCASIAN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS Student Responses: Five White Girls and One White Teacher 118 Discuss Narrative Strategies, Sexuality and Racism in Relation toJazz Responding to the Female Text 123 Sexuality and Relationships 127 Discussion of the Teenage Orphan/Mistress 129 Distance Versus Identity Themes: 134 Responses to the Wronged Woman Discussion of Felice: The Makings of a Young Feminist 136 Heroine or An Episode for Rikki Lake? White Female Readers: 141 Race and Reading in the 'White Bubble'* Hillary's Response Journal 150 Jennifer's Critical Comparison 152 Reflections on the Students' Interaction withJazz 156 CONCLUSION 161 BIBLIOGRAPHY 170 APPENDIX 180 INTRODUCTION What is the value of white readings of black texts? In the first chapter of this essay, I will discuss the skepticism concerning white feminist readings of minority texts. For example, black feminist critics such as H^el Carby have been described as firmly resisting interacial readings, "calling into question simultaneously the presumption of interracial sisterhood and the presumption of seamless continuity between racial experience, discourse, and interpretation" (Abel 489). Acknowledging the difficulties involved in reading across racial lines, I will address the need to continue diversifying the canon, specifically, the necessity of adding more African-American female texts to educational environments. As Paul Lauter, editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature has suggested, "We must be aware that no culture values all ebulliences equally and that our curricula...have validated certain experiences at the expense of others" (Canons and Contexts 102). Thus, it is necessary, when adding these diverse texts to the curriculum, to explore the imiqueness of the cultural context of the author's stoiy as well as the reader's response to the text. The addition of multi-cultural texts to the curriculum is imperative to give minority cultures representation and voice, and also to provide non-minority students with the opportunity to leam about diverse cultures and perspectives. Hopefully, students will also begin to recognize their own interpretive strategies and codes which affect their responses to people of other cultures and to minority literature. In the second chapter, I will be exploring in depth Toni Morrison's Jazz, discussing 1) critical responses to Morrison's text, emphasizing analysis of her style; 2) my claim that the style and themes of the text provide a valuable non- Western revisionary approach to history and fiction; 3) how Morrison's narrator 2 and text seem to call eagerly for reader-response to both this particular piece of fiction and to African-American female history. I will emphasize the necessity of adding feminist and, more specifically, black feminist thought to traditional reader-response techniques when encoimtering this literature. Morrison's novels are part of the female African American work which Ruth Frankenberg credits with actively transforming feminist analysis, "drawing attention to white- centeredness, and more generally the false universalizing claims, of much feminist discourse" (8). In my final chapter, I will present and analyze the responses of several Caucasian female high school students to Morrison's Jazz. I begin by discussing the cultural/racial environment of the public school these students attend, for as black feminist critic Houston Baker suggests. We must come to know our students realistically and to participate intellectually and effectively in the sounds of their everyday lives before we can meet them where they mostdecidedly are. And it is by meeting them where they are that we can begin instructive conversations about an infinite variety of possible heritages they share in a postmodern, resoundingly hybrid, and increasingly non-white era of study. (Baker 133) I will then describe how the student volimteers have used various reader- response strategies during their interaction with Jazz. Because racial isolation "seems to feed misunderstanding and suspicions" (Feagin 140), I will also discuss the necessity of providing students, especially at schools with few minority representatives, with the opportunity to read and discuss minority texts and issues. In doing so, it will be important to acknowledge our position as white readers. We must also acknowledge the complexity of any reading position, for depending upon our individual experiences, as Patricia Hill Collins suggests, an "individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed" (225). Why am I writing this paper on this topic and emphasizing this novel? 3 First of all, because like many feminist educators, I am interested in challenging traditionally privileged perspectives, I was especially intrigued by Morrison's Jazz. In this novel the narrator's perspective is challenged as he/she/it shares the storytelling "privilege" with several characters, who, due to their individual perspectives on the events which complicate their fictional lives, shed varying shades of light on the narrator's version of the basic plot. Secondly, the historical and cultural aspects of Jazz make it especially valuable as a cross-cultural reading experience for students. As will be discussed in the final chapter of this thesis. Jazz prompts Caucasian students to consider more closely Harlem ^d its African-American music of the 1920s. Thirdly, I have included information from my research of the critical reception of Jazz as well as information concerning critical perspectives on reading across racial lines. I have explored both aspects of criticism in an attempt to improve my own teaching of the novel and to assist future educators who offer Jazz or other examples of minority literature to predominately Caucasian literature classes. I have also included a segment discussing the theories of reader-response criticism in relation to my educational encounters with Jazz. The interactive structure of Jazz makes it especially conducive to reader-response criticism, which I find to be an effective avenue for both preparing and then actually facilitating a discussion of a given text with high school students, especicilly one in which the students are encouraged to cross social lines. To help empower young readers I encourage them to recognize their reading strategies and positions. As critic Robert Scholes insists, we never "just" read, we must understand that "we always read from somewhere. The anti-essentialist 'where' is essential to the postructuralist project of theorizing reading as a negotiation of socially constructed subject positions" (qtd. in Fuss 89). As mentioned earlier, I am highly committed to exploring critical responses to the literature that I use in the classroom. Moreover, when my students and I discuss a novel like Jazz, we are joining an already progressing, larger discussion among critics. Because of 4 this, insights that I can bring to the students concerning my own and other critical interpretations may help them to define their own reader-response interpretations, and to further acknowledge the ambiguity surrounding the activity of reading. I encourage students to view reading as Robert Crosman defines it: Reading is both a solitary and a communal enterprise; we read both for self-discovery and to leam about the world; and we go on learning, after we have read a text, by sharing our interpretation with others, and

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