UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Reading the (In)visible Race: African-American Subject Representation and Formation in American Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dh411p3 Author Hollingsworth, Lauren Colleen Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Reading the (In)visible Race: African-American Subject Representation and Formation in American Literature A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Lauren Colleen Hollingsworth March 2010 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jennifer Doyle, Chairperson Dr. Steven Axelrod Dr. Katherine Kinney Copyright by Lauren Colleen Hollingsworth 2010 The Dissertation of Lauren Colleen Hollingsworth is approved: ______________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside It is important that I acknowledge here the wonderful people who have helped me achieve this project. First and foremost, I would like to extend an enormous thank-you to my dissertation committee, Dr. Jennifer Doyle, Dr. Steven Axelrod, and Dr. Katherine Kinney for their support during this process. Special thanks goes to Dr. Jennifer Doyle, the Chair of my committee, who consistently and very immediately gave extensive, thoughtful, and astute comments and advice on many drafts of individual chapters. Virtually all of this took place during summer vacations and winter breaks, and I am eternally grateful for her kindness, devotion, and patience. My wonderful colleagues and students at Shasta College in Redding, California have been enormously supportive of both this project, and my career as a community college teacher. Working with such intelligent, compassionate, and dedicated people as my colleagues inspires me daily. My students challenge me intellectually in new and exciting ways every day, and most importantly, teaching and getting to know them fulfills me in a way that is beyond words. I would be remiss if I did not extend an enormous amount of gratitude to my grandmother, Winifrid Hollingsworth, the strongest woman I know. Without her generous financial support of my undergraduate education, my personal and professional life would have taken significantly different and decidedly more difficult paths. What she has given me is truly priceless, and her intelligence, grace, dignity, and moral character are inspirational. iv I must of course acknowledge my absolutely amazing family, my parents Philip and Patti Hollingsworth, and my siblings, Elizabeth Hollingsworth-Guerrine, David Hollingsworth, and Alex Hollingsworth. I cannot express enough gratitude to my parents for raising me in a household that strongly valued education, compassion, laughter, and unconditional love. In my father and mother, I could not ask for better role models as parents or human beings. Last, but definitely not least, to the two most important men in my life, my husband Aaron Hollemon, and my son Benjamin Hollemon, I owe my heart and soul. My son who was born after this project was started and before it finished, is the very definition of joy, and his beautiful face and vivacious personality remind me every day what is truly important in life. My husband, who has been a part of my personal (and therefore academic) life since I was 19 years old, I cannot thank enough for his patience, support, unwavering optimism, phenomenal sense of humor, and being my best friend for thirteen years. Aaron, you and Ben are truly my greatest accomplishments. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Reading the (In)visible Race: African-American Subject Representation and Formation in American Literature by Lauren Colleen Hollingsworth Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, March 2010 Dr. Jennifer Doyle, Chairperson This project began with the intention to examine the connection between the aesthetic and the political in American literature’s construction of African-American subjectivity, or the relationship between resistance and representation in literary portrayals of the African-American subject. I was specifically interested in the moments in American literature where the convergence between aesthetic form and political practice creates a particular crisis in representation for African-American subjectivity, many times rendering scholarly discussion of these problematic texts dismissive of their purported politics, or even non-existent. Some of the questions I wanted to grapple with included how one accounts for texts that have “good politics” in mind when written, yet vi still possess racist or “bad political” aspects through the manner in which they are presented, and the manner in which the subject position of the author affects our perception of the text. I chose to discuss American fictional texts whose readers and critics have experienced difficulty reconciling the text’s aesthetic properties with the political moves they seemed to be making in their representation of African-American subjectivity. Through close analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , Frances Harper’s abolitionist and post-Civil War poetry, and her novel Iola Leroy , Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson , Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven , Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God , and research of the criticism surrounding these texts, I found that we should not necessarily reject the notion that aesthetic representation always implies a political stance. However, if ideology and form are so closely connected, than closely examining the aesthetics of a text becomes crucial to understanding its political repercussions and the cultural work it is performing. Ultimately, I end with a plea that we acknowledge the complexity of resistance for the African-American subject and expand the ways in which we as readers and critics tend to define it. It is our continuing exploration of the complexity of racial representation in literature and cultural subject formation/construction that aids us in understanding and overcoming racism. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction 1 Part I: Reading Slavery Chapter 1. The Eyes/I’s of Uncle Tom: Form, Resistance, and Subjectivity in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin …………………………………….. 20 Chapter 2. Domestic Boundaries: Resistance, Complicity and Domesticity in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ……………………………… 60 Part II: Reading the Black Body Chapter 3. Reconstructing Discourse: Feminine Voice in the Work of Frances Harper . ……………………………………..…………………………………………. 105 Chapter 4. Fingerprinting Racial Identity: Ambiguity and Paradox in Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson ………………………………………………………. 171 Part III: Overcoming the Stereotype Chapter 5. (Un)popular Demons: Raced Subjectivity in Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven ……………………………………..………………………………… 206 Chapter 6. (De)Categorizing Janie Crawford: Self-Making, Voice, and Narrative in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching 242 God……………………… viii Introduction This project began as a desire to explore the relationship between resistance and representation in constructions of the African-American subject in American literature. The more specific goal involves the examination of and emphasis on the complexity of the convergence of the aesthetic properties of literature with the inherent political gesture that seems to be involved in representing an African-American individual within a literary text. This relationship between aesthetics and politics in general, has always been a complicated one. Marxist criticism has discussed the relationship between art and ideology in great detail, most notably in the examination of realism. Bertolt Brecht rails against the “formalistic nature of realism,” stating that “One must not construct the concept of formalism in purely aesthetic terms.” 1 For Brecht, literary works in general cannot be separated from their “social functions.” Thus, all literary form (even as Brecht terms it, “works which do not elevate literary form over social content and yet do not correspond to reality” 2) is inherently connected to ideology. Theodor Adorno complicates Brecht’s theory by claiming that “Style, form, and technique … are the features that distinguish art as knowledge from science … works of art which ignored their own form, would destroy themselves as art.” 3 Adorno further claims that art does not become knowledge or “social truth” by directly mirroring reality, but instead “reveal[s] whatever is veiled by the empirical form assumed by reality, and this is 1 Bertolt Brecht, “Against Georg Lukacs,” Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism (London: Verso, 1977), 71. 2 Brecht,“Against Georg Lukacs,” Aesthetics and Politics , 72. Brecht most notably uses the avant-garde as an example of a genre which does not overtly “correspond to reality.” 3 Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation Under Duress,” Aesthetics and Politics , 153. 1 possible only by virtue of art’s own autonomous status.” 4 Thus, for Adorno, it is the inextricable connection between aesthetics and ideology that leads him to question the possibility of an artistic work that achieves a successful political end, since, as Adorno points out, artists and political “affinities” are “rooted within society