View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository “I THOUGHT OF YOU IN HER PLACE”: REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACK WOMANHOOD IN AMERICAN LITERARY REALISM, 1868-1900 BY KERSTIN RUDOLPH DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Stephanie Foote, Chair Professor Dale Bauer Associate Professor William J. Maxwell Associate Professor Erik McDuffie ii ABSTRACT My dissertation explores postbellum texts that put African American womanhood at the heart of their narratives, both as an abstract symbol of race and gender and as embodied through female characters. I focus on realist texts that are specifically concerned with the representation of female subjectivity and set them into dialogue with the earlier, and often understood to be stylistically oppositional, genre of sentimentalism. My project explores the antagonistic dynamics around these two literary forms and challenges us to reconsider the symbolic function of the black woman from one formerly deemed outside the proper boundaries of womanhood to one that nineteenth-century writers saw as a truer and “realer” antidote to their refined white counterparts. What unites the diverse writers I analyze is that they offer alternatives to a normative model of upper-class white womanhood they deem, for various reasons, limiting, stale and outdated. Instead of claiming middle-class whiteness as normative womanhood, many of these texts suggest that white women are only understandable through the values connected to black womanhood who, in the vocabulary of the genre, constitute the real. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that it is precisely over the figure of the newly freed African American that realism intersects so profoundly with sentimentality and simultaneously becomes more like it. My approach to the role of race in realism is thus informed by an emphasis on literary form and social history, particularly as they interact in these texts’ deployment of African American womanhood. It is ultimately not the female characters themselves that are crucial to my argument but the concept of black womanhood: its social, cultural, and ideological implications drove the gender representations of realist, postbellum American literature. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Uprooting Normative Whiteness: Sentimental Sympathy in Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes and Louisa May Alcott’s Work…………………………………31 Chapter 2: Emotional Likeness – Social Distance: Sentimental Relationships Between Black and White Women in Sherwood Bonner’s Regional Stories……………………………98 Chapter 3: Passing Into the Future: Interracial Desire, African American Womanhood, and the Shaping of White Masculinity……………………………………………………………..145 Chapter 4: “The Highest Ideal [Is] Always the True Real”: Black Uplift Fiction and the Figure of the Dark-Skinned African American Woman………………………………………228 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..290 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...295 1 Introduction “White is Black” read the April 1926 review of the play Lulu Belle in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Lulu Belle was a highly successful Broadway play, featuring an African American blues singer and seductress, reminiscent of Georges Bizet’s Carmen in the popular opera. It was lauded for its “new type of realism,” showcasing African American life without the clichéd and demeaning stereotypes of black buffoonery (Harrison 228). Yet what made reviewers pass over the rather melodramatic plot of Lulu Belle in order to comment on its progressiveness was its integrated cast. While the main characters were still played by white actors in blackface, African American actors made up the majority of the speaking roles. Lulu Belle consciously played with racial identification through its mixed cast since many of the black actors were “visibly whiter than the two chief characters themselves,” leading the reviewer of “White Is Black” to conclude that director David Belasco’s handling “amounts almost to genius.” “For really,” the review continues, “as between light and dark Negroes, darkened whites and white whites, some of the white actors playing Negro roles and others just being themselves, the audience, whatever its racial philosophy simply had to trust the producer to keep the threads untangled until the end of the performance sanction [sic] breaking the illusion” (134-5). The sentiment evoked by Lulu Belle’s casting indexes the dialectical relation between the desire for clear racial categories and their real-life absence that mark the years leading from the Civil War to the beginning decades of the twentieth century. While Lulu Belle with its burlesque take on racial identity and celebration of blackness amidst the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance stands at the end of this trajectory, the 2 Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction era underwent major changes in rethinking and revising the relationship between white and black Americans. The instability of such identity categories maps in particularly visible and forceful ways onto the category of American womanhood. The aim of my project is to trace the changing, interrelated, and convoluted places white and black women inhabit on this spectrum. The narratives I analyze – Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868), Louisa May Alcott’s Work (1873), Sherwood Bonner’s “Gran’mammy” stories (1875-1877), William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty (1892), Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Victoria Earle Matthews’s “Aunt Lindy” (1889) and “Eugenie’s Mistake” (1891), and Frances W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) – often envision the ideological core of womanhood as a space where black and white women are more alike than different, where hierarchies of color are reversed or even dissolved. The characters in these texts struggle with a construction of femininity that seems to them alternately unsettling, radical, and highly complex, but also liberating. I claim that these texts suggest that white female subjectivity is always reliant on the category of black women, who, in the vocabulary of the genre, constitute the real. Although Lulu Belle’s female protagonist typifies the vamp-like qualities of a fame-hungry woman, it is important to note that white actress Lenore Ulric, “with her rich, tropical beauty,” enacted blackness among a cast that defied a mocking black- or whiteface mimicry. She played up the co-existence of racial identities, thus pointing to the changed value assigned to African American womanhood since midcentury (“White Is Black” 134). Examples like Ulric’s, coupled with a public, upbeat response to an embrace of racial ambiguity, seem to mark symbolically the new century’s break with an 3 outdated ideology of Victorian genteel womanhood. Part of my project, however, is to show that these are not unprecedented cultural turning points that are genuine to the twentieth century. Instead, I argue that they are part of a longer intervention by nineteenth-century intellectuals, writers, and artists to question the monolithic nature of upper-class white femininity and assign new value to minority women. I explore such cultural revisions of the script of gendered white normativity during the postbellum decades that led up to the early twentieth century. I focus specifically on the ways literary conventions between 1865 and 1900 portray black women as symbolic embodiments of a truer, realer, more authentic womanhood. The writers I consider were actively engaged in a cultural project of reimagining American womanhood against a changed postbellum landscape. As a result, they often used their fiction to assign value to an expression of raced femininity formerly deemed inferior, lacking, or outside of the proper boundaries of womanhood. For scholars invested in analyzing the representations of womanhood in nineteenth-century American literature, it is hard, even over forty years after its inception, to escape Barbara Welter’s landmark concept of “true womanhood.” The phrase has achieved canonical status showing the restrictions under which many white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-to-upper-class, Christian women chafed in order to embody the cultural ideals of “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Welter 152). Although Welter’s argument has become a hallmark for feminist-materialist readings of nineteenth- century gender relations, its implications that the ideology of “true womanhood” was widely and monolithically accepted as the embodiment of femininity by contemporary Americans has stifled its productiveness. Since the publication of Welter’s essay in 4 1966, critics have expanded the discussion around the “cult of true womanhood” by analyzing primary sources, both fictional and non-fictional, that measure the real-lived experiences of nineteenth-century women against this ideal and point to the manifold, competing expressions of raced and classed femininity. Hazel Carby’s influential study Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), for example, redirects our gaze from leisured white ladies to those women who served as the metaphoric backbone for upholding the pedestal of true womanhood: non-white women, especially African Americans, whose exclusion from the virtues