“ANXIETIES OF BELONGING:” THE TROPE OF THE ORPHAN IN AFRICAN- AMERICAN NOVELS ________________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board ______________________________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ________________________________________________________________________ By Christian J. Rupertus May 2018 Examining Committee Members: Dr. Roland Williams, Jr. Advisory Chair, English Department Dr. Kate Henry, English Department Dr. Joyce Joyce, English Department Dr. Nilgun Anadolu-Okur, Africology and African-American Studies Department i ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the trope of the orphan in African-American novels and analyzes the prevalence of the figurative expression in the genre over time. Alienated from and deemed illegitimate by the larger society throughout their history, African Americans have grappled with competing desires to at once belong to the nation-as- family and to simultaneously be liberated from its White supremacist underpinnings. Systematically deprived of their rightful familial and cultural inheritances from their initial arrival to the Americas, Blacks have operated out of a perpetual state of orphanhood in the United States ever since, demanding acknowledgement as equal citizens while cobbling together their own intra-racial kinship bonds. By replacing nation-as-family with race-as-family to stem the tide of oppression, African Americans endeavored to carve out protective spaces for themselves within a hostile environment. The frequent deployment of Black orphan characters in African-American novels alternately reflects and interrogates this interplay between longing and liberation, transmuting over time to foreground how the exigencies of the moment come to bear on African Americans’ collective quest to find what scholar Amy Lang calls “a home for those without a home in the nation.” In order to conduct this work, I first construct a lens through which to evaluate Black orphan characters as tropological revisions, one of the four modes of double- voiced textual relations or significations delineated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the Signifying Monkey . This opens a field of vision from which I analyze conceptualizations of kinship, home, and their relationship with what Toni Morrison calls the “anxieties of belonging” in African-American novels. Her phrase furnishes a framework for viewing ii orphanhood as a metaphor for historical conditions that have caused African Americans to confront the absence of ancestral history, a circumstance precipitated first by their forced deportation from the continent of Africa and then concatenated by the subsequent dissolution of Black family ties through the mechanics of chattel slavery. While White American novels like Huck Finn , for instance, rehearse a desire for independence and the disavowal of familial ties in favor of formulating one’s own identity, African-American narratives function as meditations on how forced dependence sought to sever Blacks from their heritage and preclude the formulation of identity, and how Blacks could resist those dehumanizing effects. My dissertation consists of six chapters that match seminal works of African- American literature with the tenor of the times around their publication date; thereby, it plots points of intersection between historical exigencies and cultural enterprises personified in the literary tradition. Opening with the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, this investigation authenticates the parameters and topographies of the trope of the orphan that recur in subsequent African-American novels, including those that are the focus of my work: Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857); Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892); Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929); Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979); and Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle (1996). By identifying characters in the given novels as instances or inflections of the trope of the orphan and its evolution over time, I demonstrate that historical conditions have rendered orphanhood a powerful symbol for the Black experience in American society, one that has come to stand for the cultural, political, and nationalistic anxieties. In plotting the coordinates of these tensions through the use of Black orphan characters, African- iii American novels destabilize fixed notions of identity. Moreover, they chart a course for attaining an authentic sense of belonging by cobbling together both intra- and inter-racial communities predicated on the acknowledgement of the full humanity of the orphaned character, and by extension, of African Americans as a whole. iv INTRODUCTION ANXIETIES OF BELONGING Orphan figures pervade African-American literature. From the tradition’s roots in antebellum autobiographical narratives, written by enslaved people, to contemporary novels, which chronicle the Black experience, the African-American orphan is a recurrent motif throughout the canon, thematically linking time periods and genres. Authors invoke the trope because of its multiple valences. The orphan lacks both home and family, and as a result, is left vulnerable to an often hostile world. The orphan’s pursuit of a sanctuary from that hostility becomes his or her means of achieving the overarching goal: to soothe anxieties of belonging. African-American literature has accorded the orphan a special place among its most valued figures and metaphors, because the orphan, disjoined from both heritage and haven, mirrors the collective history of the race. African Americans have existed in an orphan-like state in America over the course of the last four-hundred years. Forcibly separated from family and homeland and shipped to North America in chains, African Americans as a group became veritable orphans who felt the insatiable pangs of loss associated with these disjunctures. Neither the abolition of slavery nor the passage of civil rights acts a century after served to eliminate those anxieties of belonging, so it only follows that that the African- American novelistic tradition has continued to deploy the orphan figure to explore the various ways in which a people whose claims to “legitimacy, authenticity, community, and belonging” (Morrison “Home” 5) have been perpetually in doubt. The trope of the African-American orphan is what scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls a “tropological revision,” one of his four modes of double-voiced textual relations or significations. To v paraphrase the scholar, the type of modification at issue is a trope repeated with a difference across multiple texts. As Gates claims, the recurrent motif of “signifyin(g)” in African American literature “is the Black trope of tropes, the figure for Black rhetorical figures” (51). The trope of the orphan is a prime manifestation of signifyin(g), one that not only repeats with a difference the features of orphan characters depicted in White American literature, but also reappears within the African-American literary tradition across time periods in response to the changing exigencies of Black life in the United States. This dissertation shows that the trope of the orphan is a major recurrent theme in African-American novels, evolving from classic slave narratives, showing the discrete “anxieties of belonging” experienced by African Americans over the course of their collective experiences in America. Moreover, this study demonstrates that the orphan as a figure of speech in African-American novels has undergone several transmutations. In its nascent phase during the antebellum era, the trope manifests itself as both literal and figurative; orphaned Black characters live out the deleterious impact of parental loss and symbolize the cultural disjuncture wrought by the institution of slavery. Later, it mutates into a post-Reconstruction reflection of the modes of response by the African-American populace to the mechanisms of White supremacy and Jim Crow terrorism at the turn of the twentieth century. And finally, it transmutes into a critique of the reductive, fixed notions of identity that can come to bear on the Black orphan’s desire to be adopted into a family and secure what scholar Amy Lang calls “a home for those without a home in the nation” (43) in the broader American society of the mid- to late-twentieth century. vi At its most elemental level, the state of orphanhood is determined by loss. However, pinning down a precise definition of the term “orphan” can be problematic. It has a multiplicity of meanings in different cultural and historical contexts. Cheryl Nixon supplies a useful interpretation in light of her observation that “in literature, the term ‘orphan’ is often used loosely, encompassing many types of children: the unfortunate child victimized by death, the child sent away from the biological family to live with others, the abandoned child left to his or her own devices, the foundling taken in by a replacement family or institution, and the illegitimate child marked by bastardy” (5). Nixon argues, “The orphan must not only take control of his or her life, but must take control of his or her story” (15), laying the grounds for witnessing an inextricable concern with self-determination in African-American novels. Nixon places the need to take control at the heart of a child without parents. Her idea validates the implication by Houston A. Baker that Black writers have written themselves and their