View of America That Understands Interaction Between the Races to Be at Best a Paradox: Both Inevitable and Unspeakable
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Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2009 White Is a Color: Race and the Developing Modernism of Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner Margaret E. Wright-Cleveland Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES WHITE IS A COLOR: RACE AND THE DEVELOPING MODERNISM OF JEAN TOOMER, ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND WILLIAM FAULKNER By MARGARET E. WRIGHT-CLEVELAND A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2009 Copyright © 2009 Margaret E. Wright-Cleveland All Rights Reserved The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Margaret E. Wright- Cleveland defended on June 4, 2009. __________________________________ John F. Fenstermaker Professor Directing Dissertation ___________________________________ Maxine D. Jones Outside Committee Member __________________________________ Darryl Dickson-Carr Committee Member __________________________________ Barry Faulk Committee Member __________________________________ William T. Lhamon Committee Member Approved: _____________________________________ Ralph M. Berry, Chair, Department of English _____________________________________ Joseph Travis, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members. ii This dissertation is dedicated first to my father, William Lawrence Wright, who taught me to love words and ideas. It is also dedicated to my husband, Arthur D. Cleveland, who always told me I could. Finally, it is written in honor of my four daughters, that they may always know they can, too. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude and deep respect for all the faculty members of Florida State University’s English Department who mentored me during my graduate school journey. A special thanks to each of my committee members who stayed with the project across many miles and several years, meeting with me in coffee shops and book stores, answering copious emails, using each opportunity to push me to greater insights. Deo gratias for John Fenstermaker, my teacher, mentor, and friend. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .................................................................................... vi 1. The Multiple Cruxes of American Race Ideology ...................... 1 2. Shared Culture, Divided Lives: Early Education in Race Relations 10 3. Sherwood Anderson: Mentor in Letters and Race ..................... 27 4. Toomer’s Cane Initiates a New Conversation About Race ........ 38 5. Hemingway’s In Our Time Takes the Floor ............................... 55 6. Faulkner’s These 13: A Late but Not Yet Final Word ................ 72 7. Turning the Lens of Race on a Unified Canon .......................... 98 8. Works Cited ............................................................................... 102 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ............................................................. 107 v ABSTRACT As scholars have conceptualized American Literature, three prominent literary movements or groups of writers were active in the 1920s and 1930s: the Harlem or Black Renaissance; the Lost Generation or Expatriates; the Southern Renaissance. From each group came a writer whose words forever altered the language and construction of American Literature--Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, respectively. Concurrently, in the 1920s and 1930s America experienced significant racial turmoil. African American soldiers returning from World War I demanded equal rights with white soldiers; economic hardship exacerbated racism in the workplace; the South and border states firmly established Jim Crow laws. Bloodshed in race riots in twenty-six cities caused the summer of 1919 to be known as the “Red Summer.” In 1922, the House of Representatives passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. Though the Bill failed in the Senate, lynching became a point of public concern in the 1920s, and its frequency diminished. World War I, which challenged national and personal identities, produced a peace treaty that increased hostile feelings between nations. Both World War I and the subsequent peace challenged white Americans’ understanding of the solidarity of race, the relationship between ethnic groups, and the international effectiveness of racial privilege. Toomer, Hemingway, and Faulkner, then, came of age in a consciously racist America and though their individual experiences with race and racism varied greatly, their writings all demonstrate a heightened awareness of blackness, whiteness, and white privilege. Examining their early work together, we see developing a challenge to whiteness and white privilege in America. This early work establishes social construction of race as one of the institutions challenged by American Modernism. This study focuses on Toomer’s Cane (1923), Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), and Faulkner’s These 13 (1931). Each is a short-story cycle and involves a dynamism not developed in short-story collections; each shows new choices with language and construction, indicating its seminal role in American Modernism; each includes stories addressing the place of whiteness in social construction. Each writer challenges the accepted understanding of whiteness as well as its role in society. Cane demonstrates the negative effects of whiteness and white privilege on both African Americans and European Americans. In Our Time shows whiteness falling short when challenged by Native Americans, African Americans, and women. These 13 suggests whiteness and white privilege have corrupted the very foundation of democracy and capitalism in the United States. Reading these texts with attention to the social constructions of race and privilege resituates broadly ideas such as Hemingway’s Code. Asserting that courage and honor reside completely in an individual’s choice of value and personal behavior, Hemingway’s Code removes the need for society to define blackness and whiteness against each other, eliminating privilege. One cannot claim from these texts that America embraced Hemingway’s Code or that a nation can survive such individualism, but the potential for social reconstruction is there. Conversely, Faulkner shows the individual subsumed by cultural controls in the South, making identification with race and region more important than the crafting of an independent self. vi Contradicting the American value of independence, Faulkner’s portrayal of race also argues for its diminishment. Faulkner’s sense that time is not linear - that the past, present, and future interact and can ultimately be expressed in one sentence - makes each construction of blackness and whiteness relevant. Toomer’s belief that America must move away from race as a construct and embrace one hybrid “American Race” likewise eliminates the need for racial construction, comparison, and privilege. Though none of these writers has historically been considered a political activist, the words of these early compositions suggest a citizen’s interest in improving the nation. Race, and its pursuant definitions of blackness, whiteness, and privilege, becomes central, then, to both American Modernism and American Democracy. vii CHAPTER 1 THE MULTIPLES CRUXES OF AMERICAN RACE IDEOLOGY In 1992, Toni Morrison challenged the idea that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed by and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States” (4-5). She questioned whether “the major and championed characteristics of our national literature – individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figuration of death and hell – are not in fact response to a dark, binding, signing Africanist presence” (5) and ultimately, concluded that “through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence – one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their [canonical writers’] sense of Americanness” (6). The merit of Morrison’s emphasis on an Africanist presence is that it intervened in popular understandings of race and placed race as an actor, acknowledged or unacknowledged, in every American text. On one hand, Morrison supports a view of America that understands interaction between the races to be at best a paradox: both inevitable and unspeakable. Power was gained and controlled by denying interaction between black and white1, not preventing it. Weaknesses in Morrison’s claims include their easy application to support both a racial binary and a definition of Africanist presence that denies the role white America played in shaping African Americanism. For the races have always – regardless of where the power has lain – interacted and it is through this specific, reciprocal racial history of America that American identity is crafted. Since the publication of Morrison’s book seventeen years ago, the study of whiteness has exploded. History, anthropology, sociology, and literary scholars such scholars as David Roediger, Richard Dyer, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Valerie Babb have investigated the meaning, history, and