UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Coker, Douglas
Title:
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2012
Degree:
M.A.
Abstract:
I began researching this thesis with a question: is the development of the grotesque convention in Southern literature of the early to mid-twentieth century tied somehow to "redemption," the post-reconstruction period that saw the crest of lynching and mob violence against African Americans? That is, can literature be used to trace changing Southern ideas racial difference during this period, and do those ideas demonstrate a movement towards a profound white racial pessimism; a marked failure to transfer the burden of racial transgression to African Americans? To answer these questions, it becomes helpful to examine the birth of the ''New South," the sometinies violent reclamation of southern states' governments by white democrats from roughly 1877 to 1900 that accompanied and undergirded the rise of lynching and disenfranchisement of African Americans.
Particularly, it becomes helpful to examine the evolution of Southern conceptions of the "shadow of the Ethiopian," the supposed taint slavery left on the white Southerner. In characters created by George Washington Cable in his 1880 work The Grandissimes and Pauline Hopkins in her 1902 work Of One Blood there evidences a sometimes-surprising relocation of this taint.
In Cable's work, the white South shows a rapidly growing inability to render the memory of racial transgression a physical-i.e. black-trait. Instead, it becomes a psychic phenomenon. Further, this psychic phenomenon manifests in the white Southern consciousness. Cable's work evidences a destabilization of racial identities that does much to problematize whiteness and to render its history of perversity open to examination.
In Of One Blood, Hopkins tears asunder the notion of a stable white identity that Cable began to problematize. Namely, a perverse, incestuous impulse emanates from the white characters in her work, a perversity that Cable had only begun to explore. For Hopkins, the mulatto character represents a salvific move away from the quickly collapsing idea of a lily-white society. While many authors of the period-Frances Harper as a ready example-portray the mulatto figure as duty bound to better their darker brothers and sisters, Hopkins's portrayal of the figure is unique in that blackness represents an escape from a stifling, sexually perverse vision ofmwhiteness. In this portrayal of white southern identity, we are able to not only better understand the upswing in racially charged rhetoric during this period as a white attempt to reestablish already-disappeared racial binaries, we are able to see the early germination of a vision of whiteness as stiflingly static and internal. It is this conception ofwhiteness that informs the southern grotesque from Faulkner to O'Connor: a vision of whiteness as a perverse prison of the mind.
Particularly, it becomes helpful to examine the evolution of Southern conceptions of the "shadow of the Ethiopian," the supposed taint slavery left on the white Southerner. In characters created by George Washington Cable in his 1880 work The Grandissimes and Pauline Hopkins in her 1902 work Of One Blood there evidences a sometimes-surprising relocation of this taint.
In Cable's work, the white South shows a rapidly growing inability to render the memory of racial transgression a physical-i.e. black-trait. Instead, it becomes a psychic phenomenon. Further, this psychic phenomenon manifests in the white Southern consciousness. Cable's work evidences a destabilization of racial identities that does much to problematize whiteness and to render its history of perversity open to examination.
In Of One Blood, Hopkins tears asunder the notion of a stable white identity that Cable began to problematize. Namely, a perverse, incestuous impulse emanates from the white characters in her work, a perversity that Cable had only begun to explore. For Hopkins, the mulatto character represents a salvific move away from the quickly collapsing idea of a lily-white society. While many authors of the period-Frances Harper as a ready example-portray the mulatto figure as duty bound to better their darker brothers and sisters, Hopkins's portrayal of the figure is unique in that blackness represents an escape from a stifling, sexually perverse vision ofmwhiteness. In this portrayal of white southern identity, we are able to not only better understand the upswing in racially charged rhetoric during this period as a white attempt to reestablish already-disappeared racial binaries, we are able to see the early germination of a vision of whiteness as stiflingly static and internal. It is this conception ofwhiteness that informs the southern grotesque from Faulkner to O'Connor: a vision of whiteness as a perverse prison of the mind.