"When the pear blossoms / cast their pale faces on / the darker face of the earth": miscegenation, the primal scene, and the incest motif in Rita Dove's work.

Rita Dove's verse drama The Darker Face of the Earth is a curiously important text in her oeuvre. Curious, because while its initial publication date is 1994, it originates, according to Dove, in the late 1970s and was first drafted in the early 1980s, thus placing it with her earliest work (Pereira interview 185-87). Furthermore, after its initial publication, it was substantially rewritten, resulting in a "completely revised second edition," according to the cover of the 1996 version. Such a process of thinking, writing, and rewriting spanning almost twenty years of a career offers an important view into the development of key themes and issues in Dove's work.

Such a long process also suggests struggle. While Dove admits that some of the impetus for the 1996 revision came from putting the play into production (Pereira interview 185-87), that accounts for only a small portion--two years--of the play's writing process. The play's entire writing history is a struggle between burial and expression: After writing the play in the early 1980s, Dove says she "put it away"; it was only because her husband, Fred Viebahn, "kept bugging [her] every five years or so to do something that [she] finally re-wrote it and Storyline Press published it in 1994." Even then, Dove viewed the play as a repressed text in her oeuvre thinking that only "when I was dead someone would [perform] it out of pity or whatever" (Pereira interview 185). Dove's comments suggest an unconscious wish that the play remain buried. The Darker Face of the Earth has had an extended writing process because, I would argue, it presents an African American primal scene Dove's writing has anxiously repressed--and symptomatically expressed--throughout her oeuvre.

Freud saw primal scenes as originary traumas explaining adult neuroses. In "The Case of the Wolf Man," the primal scene Freud inferred was that the patient, at the age of one-and-a-half, had seen his parents copulating. Unable to comprehend the scene, he interpreted it as a violent castration of the mother, and thus repressed the memory. Various rather interesting symptoms resulted from this repression. Freud believed that discovering this primal scene in the course of psychoanalytic therapy would lift the repression and resolve the patient's neurotic symptoms. Discovery of the primal scene, however, was to be aided by the therapist, for the patient's repression is such that s/he cannot consciously remember the scene. As Ned Lukacher, in his redevelopment of the idea of the primal scene for literary analysis, asserts: In the notion of the primal scene,

Freud developed a theory of the unsaid and a technique for discovering the tropes and figures that determine the shape of a patient's discourse but that the patient himself can never remember. The patient's speech "remembers," while the patient himself remains oblivious and utterly resists all the analyst's efforts to bring the "memory" to consciousness. (12)

While perhaps overstating the lack of awareness on the part of the patient, this description of the method of determining the primal scene through tropes and figures of a patient's discourse remains useful in reading texts with an ear to hearing their repressed primal scene. For Lukacher, the critic of a literary text plays a similar role with respect to the "patient-text": "Interpretation is always a kind of listening or reading that enables one to translate one set of words into another. The voice of the text, like the voice of the patient, is a verbal mask that conceals forgotten words and the forgotten scenes they compose" (68). In brief, the critic can read the text's discourse as a key to discovering its forgotten primal scene.

Among critics using the idea of the primal scene in literary analysis, there is some difference of opinion as to the "realness" of the repressed event. Jennifer L. Holden-Kirwan writes of Beloved's experience of the Middle Passage as her primal scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, maintaining a direct connection among the lived experience, the repressed memories of the horrors, and Beloved's behavior. Likewise, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy writes of the primal scene throughout Toni Morrison's works as "the critical event (or events) whose significance to the narrated life becomes manifest only at a secondary critical event, when by a preconscious association the primal scene is recalled" (303). In contrast, Lukacher, following Freud's own doubts about the reality of the repressed events, argues (paraphrasing Althusser) that "there is no subject to the primal scene" (13). He redefines the notion of the primal scene as

a trope for reading and understanding.... In my use of the term it becomes an intertextual event that displaces the notion of the event from the ground of ontology. It calls the event's relation to the Real into question in an entirely new way. Rather than signifying the child's observation of sexual intercourse, the primal scene comes to signify an ontologically undecidable intertextual event that is situated in the differentiated space between historical memory and imaginative construction, between archival verification and interpretive freeplay. (24)

Thus, for Lukacher the actuality of the primal scene is irrelevant, a combination of historical memory and imaginative construction. Finding the "truth" of the primal scene, the "origin" of the symptoms, is endlessly deferred in texts. For critics, the interpretive role of reading the discourse of the text, of piecing together symptoms revealed in words, plot, and imagery, is an intertextual process of constructing a narrative about a primal scene. Lukacher sees the primal scene as "always the primal scene of words. At its most elemental the primal scene becomes the primal seine" (68). Yet it is important to "discover" the primal scene for relevant texts, for "the primal scene is that without which the symptoms could not have developed" (33).

Lukacher's adaptation of Freud is useful for interpreting Dove's work. I believe we can read her texts with an eye to, to borrow Lukacher's phrasing, "discovering the tropes and figures that determine the shape of [her] discourse" (12); in such a process, the primal scene we can infer in The Darker Face of the Earth helps us understand key tropes and figures persistent from her earliest work. Specifically, in the verse drama, the trope of sexual miscegenation articulates an African American primal scene of cultural amalgamation. This primal scene has been repressed and long-deferred in Dove's work, appearing symptomatically across her oeuvre in an incest motif. That an incest motif expresses the repressed primal scene becomes clear in the discourse of several Dove texts which deploy the same figurative language in each incest scene, as well as in the ultimate primal scene in The Darker Face of the Earth.

Psychoanalysis, the Black Arts Movement, and the Cultural Mulatto

Dove's incest motif and the primal scene of cultural mixing it leads us back to are expressions of her thematizing of cosmopolitanism through a cultural mulatto figure (terms I shall return to in a moment) in her early work. I am claiming that the anxieties of presenting a cosmopolitan artistic identity are so significant for a post-Black Arts Movement black writer--and the idea of cultural mixing so unpleasant to some in a post-Black Arts Movement black audience--that a primal scene of such cultural mixing would be repressed, causing "neurotic symptoms" in texts. Claudia Tate, in her groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, explains the pressures on black writers writing in a racialized society. Drawing on the comments of Toni Morrison, who asserts the black writer is always conscious of representing his/her own race, Tate observes that "this condition marks the text, even in those instances in which the text is not otherwise racially designated. Furthermore, such wor ks inscribe a process by which the respective author negotiates explicit, public, racial identifications--or what I am calling the protocols of race-with the implicit, private psychological effects of narrative subjectivity" (10). Tate thus depicts African American writers as navigating a demanding terrain of racial and cultural affiliation not always in sync with their desire and subjectivity (13). When a text fails to meet the socially sanctioned protocols of traditional black literature, it and its author face racial censure, and the text often becomes an anomaly that is repressed in the tradition (9).

For Dove, this tension between individual desire and the protocols of race plays out against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement (approximately 1964-1975) and her middle-class upbringing. As Tate notes (although not in reference to Dove specifically), "When protest-oriented directives dominated the African American critical viewpoint, a literary work of even renowned black authorship risked intraracial censure if it failed to manifest the sociological factors of an oppressive 'black experience'" (4). Black nationalist prescriptions for literature dominant during the 1960s and 1970s included, in Maulana Karenga's words, that black literature must be "functional, collective, and committing" (1973-1974)--meaning that it was to function as a tool of the revolution, be of and for black people, and commit itself and its audience to the revolution. Dove came of age during this time period, beginning college in 1970. Raised in a middle-class family (her father was the first black chemist at Goodyear), given all t he opportunities of education and travel afforded by middle-class life, and thus exposed, substantially, not only to white American but also to European culture (B.A., Miami University of Ohio; year at Universitat de Tubingen; M.F.A., Iowa Writer's Workshop; lived in Europe), Dove is part of the major rise in the black middle class since the 1960s. A distinctive feature of her life and work is her cultural amalgamation. She plays the viola da gamba (an archaic classical European string instrument), tells of her father's handling racism at work (he was an elevator operator with a master's degree in chemistry until jobs opened up to blacks in the 1950s), speaks fluent German, and has maternal grandparents who came north as part of the Great Migration of African Americans in the early part of the century. Her work, particularly her poetry, insists, as Arnold Rampersad notes, on the widest possible range of allusion, drawing on a diverse global and historical range of reference.

Dove has commented on her feelings about this period in several interviews, most extensively with Therese Steffen in 1998. Responding to a question about the Black Arts Movement, Dove says, "... the insistence on black art was just a device, a way of establishing territory or generating publicity. It was necessary at one time to underscore that 'otherness' in order to get any kind of respect whatsoever, but the insistence on difference also requires one to erect certain walls or obey certain rules--all of which is anathema to the artist." Dove acknowledges, as well, that she was "incredibly excited about some aspects of the Black Arts Movement.. [such as] the syncopation of jazz, the verbal one-upmanship of signifying or the dozens." But, ultimately, Dove was very concerned about the "political fray," revealing:

I shied away from publishing early poems like "Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove" because I didn't think I was strong enough to withstand the political fallout. I didn't want to have to answer questions from Black Arts people like, "Why are you writing about a white--German! artist?" I waited; I stepped out as a writer later, when things became more tolerant. (108)

Dove's culturally mixed subjectivity and desires, then, do not always mesh with the black nationalist protocols of race in place in the 1970s, when she first defined herself as a poet. As Lynn Keller puts it, "Because of narrow prescriptions of what constitutes authentically black writing, black readers in particular have been uncomfortable with what many have perceived as Dove's lack of racial consciousness" (136). For Dove, being who she was risked censure from other African Americans.

Trey Ellis describes artists in the contemporary, 1980s period following the Black Arts Movement as cultural mulattoes who are African Americans "educated by a multiracial mix of cultures. And it is by and large this rapidly growing group of cultural mulattoes that fuels the [New Black Aesthetic]. We no longer need to deny or suppress any part of our complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural baggage to please either white people or black" (235). Ellis further emphasizes that this cultural mulatto is black "Today's cultural mulattoes echo those 'tragic mulattoes' critic Sterling Brown wrote about in the Thirties only when they too forget they are wholly black" (235); in other words, he insists that cultural mulattoes are not trying to or abandon the race. Although Ellis refers to writers other than Dove as examples, his ideas encapsulate much of her position in contemporary African American literature. (1) In Ellis's statement, the idea of repression appears in his word choice: "deny or suppress." His comments expose the pressures of racial protocols as they are brought to bear on black writers and the fear of racial censure some experience as a result of cultural amalgamation. Such fear is traumatic to the black artist, so much so that, even though Ellis claims there is no longer a need to repress one's cultural mixing, he feels the need specifically to assert the blackness of the cultural mulatto.

Ross Posnock's recent Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modem Intellectual helps us understand Ellis's manifesto in terms of a longstanding tension between black specificity and the "cosmopolitan" strain within the black intellectual tradition. Posnock identifies a longstanding belief in being a "world citizen" and in using a wide range of cultural materials, as expressed in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurs ton, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and James Baldwin. Cosmopolitanism, as practiced and preached in the black intellectual tradition, according to Posnock, maintains that culture has no color (10). Culture, especially American culture, is composite; Alain Locke argued that cultural goods " 'are no longer the exclusive property of the race or people that originated them. They belong to all who can use them' "(qtd. in Posnock 11). Both Locke and Du Bois, Posnock demonstrates, affirm the original cosmopolitan ideal (from the Greco-Roman Stoics) of a "world citi zen" (12) who draws freely upon cultural materials. Du Bois emphasizes a dialectical relationship between the racial particular and the unraced universal, insisting that artists and intellectuals must recognize the universal in the particular or risk" 'group exclusiveness and segregation'" (qtd. in Posnock 13). Posnock brings this strain in the tradition up to the present with Samuel Delaney and Adrienne Kennedy, but does not mention Dove's work. This cosmopolitan tradition helps us understand Dove's place in the historical trajectory of black intellectual thought and suggests that her portrayal of a cultural mulatto figure in her work may be read as a thematization of her anxieties about her reception. Thus, Ellis's New Black Aesthetic may not be at all "new." The gap between the two terms--cosmopolitan and cultural mulatto--is the gap between acknowledging the anxieties surrounding the idea of cultural amalgamation (which Posnock does) and suppressing such anxieties so that they emerge in inflammatory rhetori c (which Ellis does).

The pressures on twentieth-century African American writers generally (and post-Black Arts Movement writers especially) to follow racial protocols, writing within the protest theme or on overtly black American subject matter, cause very real tensions; furthermore, stepping outside such protocols can be traumatic as writers risk intraracial attack for abandoning the race. For Rita Dove, a cosmopolitan African American writing at the forefront of the New Black Aesthetic, cultural amalgamation thus becomes an originary moment that must be repressed, for to acknowledge cultural mixing openly threatens the exclusivity-of-blackness mantra of black nationalism dominant when she began writing. (2) Furthermore, Dove's work suggests that such repression of a primal scene of cultural amalgamation operates not only on the individual level for the cosmopolitan black artist, but also for African Americans generally, who may reject cultural mixing for African Americans as a threat to blackness and group solidarity. (3)

Cultural Amalgamation and Sexual Miscegenation

In Dove's work, the idea of cultural amalgamation--a difficult concept to find an image for, to be sure, being so intangible--finds articulation in sexual miscegenation, both voluntary and involuntary (rape). Dove's writing displaces cultural mixing onto physical, biological mixing of the races. The "open secret" of miscegenation from America's slave past thereby offers the concrete figure for the cultural miscegenation that gives birth to the cultural mulatto of the late twentieth century. The title of The Darker Face of the Earth comes from lines in the play depicting an interracial rape: "When the pear blossoms / cast their pale faces on/the darker face of the earth" (1st ed. 76). These lines are spoken by the mulatto protagonist Augustus in a creation tale he spins in explanation of his conception. The use of cast suggests some degree of violence or force used by the "pale faces" upon the "darker face[s]," thus depicting the rapes of so many black women by white men in the antebellum period. This involuntar y miscegenation is balanced in the text by the voluntary, miscegenous relationships of the white plantation mistress, Amalia, first with the slave Hector, and then with her son by Hector, Augustus. Both kinds of sexual miscegenation, voluntary and involuntary, combine in the text to explain the creation of the mulatto Augustus: His mother Amalia voluntarily pursued a miscegenous relationship with Hector in response to her husband, Louis, raping slave girls (1st ed. 14-16).

A quick summary of the play's (noticeably Oedipal) plot might help here: The play opens with the birth of Augustus to the white slave mistress Amalia Jennings (who was impregnated by the black slave Hector). Augustus is clearly mixed racially; Amalia's husband Louis is furious (even though he's been raping slave girls), so Augustus cannot be acknowledged as Amalia's child. They tell everyone he died at birth and the doctor takes him away to be raised a slave. Hector is devastated. Twenty years later, after an extended period of education and travel with a fatherly white master which has given him a "mix" of cultural experiences, Augustus is bought by the Jennings plantation despite a recent history of rebellion. He and Amalia begin an affair (obviously he does not know she is his mother, believing, instead, to have been born of a slave woman after having been raped by her white master). Another woman, the slave Phebe, expresses interest in a relationship with him, and the slave Scylla warns of impending doom . When Augustus becomes involved in an insurrection plot, he accidentally kills Hector (who he does not realize is his father) to prevent him revealing the plot. By the end, Augustus has not followed through on his orders from the rebels and is in a rather compromised position, having been ordered to kill Amalia. In the final pages he kills Louis, thinking he is his father, then learns the truth from Amalia-that she and Hector are his parents (which she has just realized). How and whether he and Amalia die, or live, depends on the edition of the play.

The sexual miscegenation in Augustus's origins and relationship with Amalia in the text is clearly linked to Augustus's creation as a cultural mulatto. Echoing Lukacher's assertion that the primal scene is an "ontologically undecidable intertextual event that is situated in the differentiated space between historical memory and imaginative construction" (24), Augustus's biological mixing due to the historical reality of sexual mixing is inflected with Dove's artistic anxieties about cultural mixings. (4) His cultural mixing, in the first edition of the play, causes conflicting loyalties that lead to his death. While he knows slave culture, he also speaks of Greek and Roman gods, the French Revolution, and John Milton. Dove emphasizes his surrogate parenting by his white master, Captain Newcastle, which exposed him to travel and multiple cultures. Augustus values these experiences, telling Phebe, it's "nothing you couldn't learn / if you had the chance" (1st ed. 44). That Augustus's cultural amalgamation is i mbued with Dove's own cosmopolitan poetic persona becomes clear in Amalia Jennings's appraisal of him as "a poet / as well as a rebel" (1st ed. 65). Dove expresses her sense of Augustus's nascent poetic identity and thus parallels him with herself in the program for the 1997 production, writing, ". . . in a different world, Amalia (the Jocasta figure) might have been a woman of independent means and Augustus (who recalls Oedipus) a poet" (10).

Dove's anxiety accompanying Augustus's role as a cultural, not just biological, mulatto is made manifest in the plot developments of the first edition. Beyond his dual educations, a fact established immediately upon his arrival at the Jennings plantation, Augustus's dual--and contradictory--set of relationships on the plantation charts a difficult course for him. The play traces the developing romantic relationship with Amalia alongside a series of undeveloped and/or truncated relationships within the slave community: Augustus engages the interests of Phebe, but does not pursue a romantic relationship with her; he rejects Scylla's prophetic warnings as irrelevant hocus pocus; instead of protecting and caring for the aging Hector (his father), he accidently kills him; and he half-heartedly signs on as part of a rebel plot, yet fails to follow through on his responsibilities and is ultimately murdered (in the first edition) alongside Amalia as a traitor. Such a plot of divided loyalties depicts a problematic r elationship for the cultural mulatto "poet" with the black community.

In each of the above instances, Augustus's undeveloped or failed relationships with the slaves is a direct result of his developed relationship with whites: He does not pursue Phebe because he's involved with Amalia; he perceives Scylla's voodoo with the skepticism of Western empiricism, inculcated in him by his white master/father figure Captain Newcastle; he kills Hector while trying to silence his cries of warning to Amalia that she is in danger, which Hector senses when Augustus speaks her name; he doesn't complete his assignments for the rebels because he's sleeping with Amalia. Dove's own anxieties about the price of being a cosmopolitan artist within the black literary community imaginatively construct Augustus's plot into a Greek tragedy along the lines of: exceptional, larger-than-life individual rises to great heights but suffers a reversal of fortunes because of a fatal flaw--he abandons, or is perceived to abandon, the race and is censured by other blacks. This plot speaks a fear of the contempor ary "cultural mulatto" artist.

The Incest Motif

It took Dove fifteen years to see this plot depicting fear about cultural amalgamation and intraracial censure--a primal scene for the cultural mulatto and an African American primal scene generally--into print, conceiving of the play in the late 1970s and publishing the first edition in 1994. Reading through the lens of this primal scene in The Darker Face of the Earth can help us see how two of her earliest works demonstrate the presence of the tropes and figures of this constellation of cultural amalgamation and miscegenation in her discourse, although neither develops into an expression of the primal scene like Darker Face. In her first volume of poems, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), there is one poetic sequence, "A Suite for Augustus," which echoes the image pattern of sexual miscegenation: Washington D.C., the Washington monument, and the Reflecting Pool are described as "a postcard framed by imported blossoms -- / and now this outrageous cue stick / lying, reflected, on a black table" (26). Thi s is an image of interracial rape, as suggested in the word outrageous, meaning 'violent; atrocious.' Two more details in this series-the poetic persona's description of her heart as that of a "shy mulatto" (29), and Dove's use of the Augustus figure--both suggest Dove's nascent awareness of the anxieties we later see more fully articulated in Darker Face. (5) In the short story "The Spray Paint King" (written and published in Gargoyle shortly after the publication of The Yellow House on the Corner and subsequently published in Fifth Sunday [1985]), Dove explores the issue of cultural mixing in a story about a German adolescent artist who is one-quarter black, which I argue elsewhere is a Kunstlerroman. (6) But after these two early instances, Dove's discourse seemingly "forgets" the issue of cultural amalgamation and its trope of sexual miscegenation for a period of almost ten years, 1985-1994. Instead, it emerges symptomatically in an incest motif, appearing across the genres in her ceuvre: in the short sto ry "Aunt Carrie," closing the 1985 collection Fifth Sunday in the poem "Taking in Wash," opening the Beulah section of the long poem Thomas and Beulah (1986); and again in the last thirty pages of her novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992). Finally, of course, it leads Dove to The Darker Face of the Earth (1994 and 1996), in which the incest motif is revealed to be a symptomatic expression of a primal scene of cultural amalgamation.

The three incest episodes in Dove's discourse share a pattern of figuration: sheets being washed, a hanky with a rose in the corner, and skin tone difference between a pale male and a dark female. In each case, acts of repression are part of the plot or character development. (7)

"Aunt Carrie," the short story, is about a young woman visiting her aunt for some answers to a childhood moment in a train station that she has never understood. As she presses the aunt to explain, she intuits, "I was very close to the secret--if I only persisted" (Fifth 62). The secret comes out slowly, revealing that, when Aunt Carrie was widowed in her early adulthood, she moved back home and had a series of sexual encounters with her younger brother, Ernest (Ernie), the young woman's father. The affair lasted over a spring and summer, till she decided it wasn't right and stopped it. This family "secret" of incest was later discovered by Ernest's wife, well into their marriage; and their daughter vaguely remembers the awkward scene at the train station when her mother brought the aunt to confront Ernest with her knowledge.

The first occasion of sex between the brother and sister occurs on a day she had "been washing sheets" and hanging them out to line dry (64). He comes to help her with them and offers to help her make the bed. Here the implication of sheets signifying sexual union becomes literally true, for it provides the opportunity for them to have sex. There is ironic tension between the clean sheets "flicking" her shins at the clothesline and then her undressing in the bathroom, while she "could still feel that sheet beating against [her]" (65). Knowing incest is an "unclean" act heightens the awareness of the taboo she is violating. Furthermore, as Aunt Carrie tells her "secret" to her niece, she dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief, "small and white with a pink rose in one corner." As she works the hanky, "Sometimes the rose could be seen among the twisted ends of the cotton, a delicate blemish" (61). The word hanky connotes 'hanky-panky,' or naughty sexual play. (8) The feminine image of the rose, here specifically p ink, acts as a figure of female genitalia, sexuality, and, ironically, idealized womanhood. That it is a "delicate blemish" suggests the sullying of an ideal, an "impurity," only "sometimes" to be "seen" among the twisted ends, just as secret incest (a "delicate" topic to be sure), or any other impurity in family history, is usually kept hidden by twisted stories and lies.

A pattern of skin tone difference is established in this first incest episode, in which the male is pale and the female, dark. Ernie, according to Carrie, "looked pale," even "ashy" (64), while the niece describes her aunt as having a "dark and wrinkled countenance" (59). Even in this non-miscegenous relationship, the figuration of miscegenation is beginning to emerge, echoing the rapes of black slave women by white men.

The mechanism of repression at work here is noted in the way Ernest's wife learns of the incestous affair: Cleaning his mother's picture, she decides to put it in a new frame and discovers a note Carrie had written him after the first time, a note assuring of his manhood, etc. The idea of a note behind an image, especially an image of family stability and uprightness such as the matriarch of the clan, marks the repression of a family taboo. That his wife finds the note while cleaning highlights the ironic contrast to the "unclean" contents of the note (66). The way the incident is handled in the family also represents the classic moves of repression: As Carrie's niece realizes about her aunt, "We forgot all about you" (67), because after that day at the train station she was never again mentioned. In fact, when the train had pulled into the station with her father (as they await him with the "truth" his wife is about to reveal), a draft of "cool stale air swept upwards like the breath of the underworld" (60), signifying the coming to the surface of a long-repressed truth. While for the daughter, the next generation, such revelations seem necessary to tracing her lineage (thus, once she's heard it, she feels "very relaxed" [67]). to the older generation, such as Carrie, burial is a welcome thing. In fact, she and Ernest's mother-in-law, his wife's mother, end up friends in old age: The core of their rapport is, as Carrie puts it, that "she told me what she knew. She didn't want to hear my story. 'Old bones, dead and buried,' she said. So we became friends" (68).

In this first incest episode in Dove's work, we can read how repressed anxieties about cultural amalgamation (the primal scene) have metamorphosed into a representation of incest. The "taboo" sexuality shifts from miscegenation to incest, with the racial difference between white and black appearing instead as an intraracial color contrast in skin tone. The sheets and the hanky act mostly as vehicles for the sexual act(s) and the sadness and shame accompanying the revelation (the trauma of the primal scene). Dove's extended treatment of repressions in the story suggests, on some level, a sell-reflexive awareness in her discourse that this story is itself a repression, not just about a repression (a departure from Freud's and Lukacher's models, in which the patient is completely unaware of the primal scene or its repression). The different attitudes toward repression, in which the young woman wants the truth out but the community and older generation, represented by the old women, seems to want to keep it burie d shows how, in Dove's work, the anxiety and repression operate not only on the individual level for the cosmopolitan artist, but also for African Americans generally. One reason the idea of cultural amalgamation must go underground and emerge in an incest motif, this implies, is because the African American community, especially the older generations, would rather keep it buried.

Incest next appears in Dove's work in the opening poem of Thomas and Beulah, "Taking in Wash" (47). It is heavily coded:

Papa called her Pearl when he came
   home
drunk, swaying as if the wind touched
only him. Towards winter his skin
   paled,
buckeye to ginger root, cold drawing
the yellow out. The Cherokee in him,
Mama said. Mama never changed:
when the dog crawled under the stove
and the back gate slammed, Mama hid
the laundry. Sheba barked as she
   barked
in snow or clover, a spoiled and ornery
   bitch.

She was Papa's girl,
black though she was. Once,
in winter, she walked through a dream
all the way down the stairs
to stop at the mirror, a beast
with stricken eyes
who screamed the house awake.
   Tonight

every light hums, the kitchen arctic
with sheets. Papa is making the han-
   kies
sail. Her foot upon a silk
stitched rose, she waits
until he turns, his smile sliding all
   over.
Mama a tight dark fist.

Touch that child

and I'll cut you down
just like the cedar of Lebanon. (47)

The possibility of an incestuous relationship between Papa and the speaker is implied by the identification of the speaker as "Papa's girl," suggesting she has his special favor and attention. (9) Mama's warning at the end of the poem can be seen as a coded intervening in sexual abuse by Papa on the daughter: Touch takes a prominent place at the beginning of the line, emphasizing the physical dimensions of the contact Mama rejects. The daughter's nightmare in the middle stanza of the poem hints at possible nighttime traumas, or acts that cause her to have "stricken eyes" and nightmares. And Papa's "smile sliding all over" offers the implication that it slides over the girl--it is never stated whether there is an object of his smile sliding.

The imagery of sheets and hankies repeats the pattern in "Aunt Carrie"; in this case, the detail of the girl standing upon the "stitched rose" of one hanky evokes not only femininity and sexuality but also implies a loss of virginity and perhaps oppression and exploitation (it is not a bud, but an open rose; plus it is being stood upon).

The skin tone contrast occurs here as well. In the first stanza of the poem, Papa's "yellow" marks his partly "Cherokee" ancestry. "His skin paled" in winter contrasts with the explicitly dark complexion of his daughter, who in the second stanza is represented as "Papa's girl, / black though she was." This comes a little closer to miscegenation than the intraracial skin tone contrast of Aunt Carrie and her brother Ernest, because it introduces a racially mixed figure. But if there is Cherokee in Papa, there is Cherokee in Beulah, so the focus remains on the incest taboo. And again, it is a pale male and dark female.

The second stanza reveals the mechanism of repression at work in the child's nightmare, in which she sleepwalks and, looking in the mirror, does not recognize herself, instead seeing a "beast / with stricken eyes / who screamed the house awake." This implies she has been subjected to something that horrifies her, makes her see a beast in the mirror, something heretofore repressed and only brought out at night. In contrast, the remainder of the poem occurs while "every light hums," suggesting an artificial daytime (although it is night) in which exposure (of incest?) is imminent. The color imagery intensifies with the image of the kitchen "arctic / with sheets," relaying the whiteness of the scene as well as its death-like coldness.

Lastly, Mama's invocation of Psalm 29.5, "I'll cut you down / just like the cedar of Lebanon," suggests a righteousness on her part toward Papa, for that psalm celebrates the Lord's strength and glory in His ability to break the cedars of Lebanon. The ending thus strongly implies Papa's "touching" the child would be something worthy of God's wrath (of which Mama would be the agent). But perhaps Mama herself is an agent of repression: It is she, after all, who hides the laundry (the sheets and hankies). Perhaps she herself represses what Papa has done to Beulah. (10) That the poem's insinuation of incest is so coded itself represses the articulation of incest. In the later poems in which the father appears (all in connection with Beulah's marriage and Thomas), there are no direct expressions that an incestuous relationship has occurred. Thus, after this first poem, Beulah's entire section exhibits a code of silence about the possibility of incest, in which it appears she and her family "forgot all about it," as should the reader. (11)

The third incest episode in Dove's oeuvre is a rewrite of the Aunt Carrie story in her novel Through the Ivory Gate. (12) The details of the episode as we have been discussing it remain the same as in the short story: hanky with a rosebud in the corner, sheets, pale male and dark female, repression imaged in a note behind a photo, and the family "forgetting" Aunt Carrie. The context--in this case, a novel of artistic development--is more extensive than the short story and underlines the importance of reading the episode as a symptom of a repressed primal scene of cultural amalgamation.

Interestingly, given Freud's focus on the mechanisms of dream work, Dove reveals the novel actually was sparked by a dream she had about a black woman puppeteer (Hammer and Daub interview 29). In Ivory Gate, the protagonist Virginia struggles with career issues and dating; her discovery of her aunt's incest years ago with her (Virginia's) father seems unrelated to these issues, unless one reads the incest as an expression of the repressed primal scene of cultural amalgamation that Virginia must acknowledge in order to understand herself and her mixed cultural heritage. Virginia, much like Dove, is cosmopolitan, raised in a black middle-class family, college-educated, a cellist who works as a puppeteer. The novel details her constant amalgamations: her grandmother who snorts, "You can't teach these white folks nothing" (60); childhood visits with Mrs. Voltz, a Hungarian immigrant and one of the last white people in her neighborhood, who teaches Virginia Greek words and tells her that Akron means "high place" (71); her love of the cello and classical music, especially one scene in which she realizes how to play Bach--"It was like jazz, what Ellington meant by It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Playing Bach, she had to put inaccuracy into every note, that supreme inaccuracy" (99); her mother's desire that she pursue a profession such as doctor or lawyer to "advance the race" (94); the memory of her first straight "A" report card, which, when she showed it to her white friend Karen, got her shoved in the snow and called "Nigger."

Because of her culturally mixed upbringing, Virginia struggles with issues of racial affiliation throughout the novel, early on in an episode about a black doll, (13) for example, and later in the story in a developing romantic relationship with a black male county supervisor. The novel's title, after all, is Through the Ivory Gate, a title suggestive of her one-way, no-turning-back passage through the gates of traditionally white-identified, middle-class, college-educated experiences. Such a title suggests that the main tension of the novel might be expressed as a question: How does one maintain racial and cultural affiliation when one has gone through the ivory gate and become culturally mixed? It's not as if Virginia can turn back. The "ivory" not only connotes white culture, but it also suggests value, and value her passage she does. Read through this lens, the discovery of the familial incest in the last thirty pages of the novel has the narrative effect of "explaining" a family "origin" that helps Virg inia resolve some of the tensions about her life as a cultural mulatto.

That the incest is a cover for a primal scene of cultural amalgamation finds force when we look at the plot logically: Why would finding out about incest between one's father and his sister years ago help Virginia decide to pursue an off-Broadway play with one of the white puppeteers with whom she had worked, abandoning a developing romance with a black man? Such a revelation becomes relevant only when read as a coded articulation of the cultural miscegenation in Virginia's upbringing. Here, the title's sexual undertones help us see the primal scene being symptomatically expressed (and furthermore anticipate the switch from pale male with dark woman to dark male with white woman in The Darker Face of the Earth, Dove's next publication after Through the Ivory Gate): To go through the ivory gate describes the sexual penetration of a white woman, the "taboo" miscegenous crossing in American culture for black men. That threshold has been locked until the recent history of Virginia's (and Dove's) generation. It h as also been, then, a "taboo" crossing culturally for blacks, one that must be repressed, at least as far as some in the older generations in the black community are concerned. Thus, in the novel, the revelation of incest near the end of the novel, in the logic of repression, validates the protagonist's passage through the ivory gate as a cultural mulatto figure. It "explains" something from her origins that shapes her to make that choice.

In all three instances of incest, in fact, the episode appears as formative, an origin explaining the character and/or text. Dove places these scenes in key beginning or ending sites in order to highlight their importance as originary moments that shape a life; one must either know about the incest trauma from the beginning, as in the Beulah poem, or must work one's way back to it in order to understand the plot and the character's life, as in the two Aunt Carrie versions. These placements echo Freud's basic notion of the primal scene as an originary trauma explaining adult neuroses. So, one can read both in the discourse of these episodes as well as in their textual placements Dove's writing her way back home to some originary trauma, a primal scene. (14)

The Primal Scene

The incest motif in the first edition of The Darker Face of the Earth is portrayed as the result of the originary trauma of repression of the primal scene of cultural amalgamation as intertwined with sexual miscegenation. Augustus's incest with his mother is only possible because of the repression of his origins (on both individual and cultural levels) and the cultural amalgamation that partially affiliates him with white culture. Thus Dove critiques the repression of our mixed cultural heritage. The incest motif becomes incidental to cultural amalgamation and sexual miscegenation because the originary trauma, the repressed primal scene, is articulated in the opening pages of the play. In this scene we see the literalization of the title of Dove's novel published two years earlier: the birth of the cultural mulatto Augustus through the ivory gate of Amalia Jennings's thighs. That this scene is not a sexual primal scene, although it is obviously the result of a sexual episode, emphasizes that Dove's concerns lie not with sexual miscegenation per se, but, rather, with the less tangible results of our miscegenous history--cultural amalgamation. The primal scene she needs to depict is the origin that explains her own amalgamated and cosmopolitan artistic identity, the birth of the cultural mulatto.

A quick sketch of the opening scene: As the slaves, especially Hector (the child's father) await word outside, the slave mistress Amalia Jennings gives birth in her bedroom, attended by a doctor. The baby boy is clearly racially mixed. Louis Jennings wants to kill Amalia and the baby, but the doctor restrains him. However, as the doctor prepares to leave with the infant hidden in Amalia's sewing basket, Louis tucks a pair of riding spurs inside, hoping to end the baby's life during the rough ride. The opening scene of the play presents the primal scene of Dove's discourse, (15) a scene, as Lukacher would put it, situated between historical memory and imaginative construction. Drawing on historically verifiable elements of our miscegenous slave past, and reconstructing them in an interpretive freeplay inflected with her own anxieties about being perceived as a cultural mulatto and African Americans' general anxieties about cultural mixing, Dove crafts a primal scene signifying an "event" that can't actually be said to exist anywhere as an origin. This scene replays the key elements of Dove's incest motif discourse in displaced images, but the pattern remains. The sheets are transformed into a bed, here the bed of childbirth, where Amalia has just given birth to Augustus. The hanky is moved to scene five of the play, but the rose remains, both in the name of the black midwife Rose and in the rosettes on the sewing basket in which Augustus is taken away by the Doctor. The color difference present in the incest scenes has several versions in this primal scene: the pale female (Amalia) and dark male (Hector, father of Augustus); the pale male and the dark female, represented by Amalia's references to Louis's rapes of slave girls (16); and the pale female and dark male color contrast apparent in the mother-son dyad of Amalia and Augustus. This suggests Dove's insistence on the historical variations in the multiple racial pairings giving rise to cultural amalgamation, privileging no one version of the origin (a shift fr om the incest scenes, which were solely pale male with dark female).

And the mechanism of repression in this scene is certain: Not only will Augustus's existence be repressed, but the particular racial make-up of his parents will be too in the tale the doctor will tell. In fact, Louis wants to repress it so badly he's willing to kill the baby to keep it all quiet. The doctor convinces them to say the baby is dead, but he will take him away to be raised. Furthermore, "Everyone must think / the baby's father is the one who's white" (18), thus repressing his true origins as the son of a white woman and a black man. The slaves will be ordered to repress the scene as well, being told, "Miss Jennings wants to forget" (21). That this scene opens the play demands we read it as a formative, primal origin essential to Augustus's character and development. On a broader scale, this scene can be read as a figure of the repression of the cosmopolitan tradition (as Posnock argues), and Dove's play as, thus, an articulation of an originary primal scene we all--black and white--must acknowledg e in order to gain racial and interracial health. (16)

When, at the end of the first edition of the play, after the deaths of Hector, Louis, Amalia, and Augustus (whose body lies atop his mother's in an embrace similar to love-making), the slaves shout, "We're free! We're free!" (140), Dove's play proclaims a release from an originary trauma, a primal scene of cultural amalgamation. "Preoccupation with death often represents a desire to return to origins, a longing to start again, to reinstitute beginnings and reaffirm becoming," remarks critic Susan Stanford Friedman (281). The deaths of these major characters can be viewed as a cleansing return to origins, to the truth of an originary trauma that, now articulated, sets free those who remain. But the price of speaking that truth was, in the 1994 edition, the death of the cultural mulatto figure at the hands of the rebel blacks.

Coming to Terms with the Cultural Mulatto

The negative outcome of Augustus's divided life as a cultural mulatto figure in the 1994 version of the play is substantially altered in the 1996 edition. The revisions show Dove's continuing engagement with the tropes and figures of cultural amalgamation in her discourse and suggest a coming to terms with the cultural mulatto figure not possible in the earlier edition, focused as it was--by necessity--on articulating a primal scene heretofore unacknowledged. Generally, Dove's revisions flesh out the characters of Hector and Amalia, Augustus's parents, making them much less stock figures in Augustus's primal scene and more fully dimensional. Beyond this rounding out, however, it is interesting to consider how Dove's perception of racial protocols affected the 1994 version when read through the 1996 rewrite. Along with the development of the parents, the story of their romance is elaborated, using imagery from Dove's incest motif, thereby strengthening the intertextual pattern between the incest motif and this text's primal scene. And, finally, Augustus's fate changes dramatically in the 1996 edition, suggesting a new sense of ease for the cultural mulatto in Dove's writing.

Hector and Amalia both develop considerably. Hector becomes, as Dove puts it, more than "just a crazy man in the swamp" (Pereira interview 186); the 1996 edition strengthens his Africanness, identifying him in the cast of characters as an African, and commenting at several points throughout the text on his ties to Africa. One way to read this is as an underlining of blackness similar to Trey Ellis's insistence in his comments on cultural mulatto contemporary artists, that they too are "wholly black." Emphasizing Hector's Africanness affirms the ties of his son Augustus to Africa and blackness, thus fulfilling a key racial protocol of racial affiliation and demonstrating Dove's own desire to do so. (17) Likewise, Amalia's character becomes a multi-dimensional, and even a nurturing and loving, figure. In contrast to Hector's development as seemingly fulfilling racial protocols, Amalia's violates them by portraying a white plantation mistress sympathetically. Dove seems no longer to fear intraracial censure over such a depiction. The changes in Hector's and Amalia's characters suggest that Dove, having articulated the primal scene of the cultural mulatto, feels freer to cross such cultural boundaries overtly now, rather than covertly, enacting her cosmopolitan identity as an artist.

In the second edition Dove also develops the miscegenous relationship between Hector and Amalia, making it quite romantic and extending an image pattern we saw in the incest episodes. This reinforces my claims that incest stands in for cultural amalgamation in Dove's earlier work and that The Darker Face of the Earth expresses the origins of the cultural mulatto heretofore repressed. Dove elaborates on the rose imagery from the incest motif, which is also present in the 1994 edition of the play, but only as a minor detail. In the 1996 version, Hector and Amalia's romance develops when, as children, they play in the rose garden. One day, she recalls, he covered her in rose petals. When she returns home as a bride, Hector offers a rose to Amalia as a "tribute to the bride" (22). Hector's mad chatter reveals his enduring memory of these scenes, as he refers to the "smell" of a rose twice (66, 116). Hector's son Augustus even picks up the rose motif when he flirts with Amalia by saying, "You can put a rose in a v ase / with a bunch of other flowers; / but when you walk into the room / the rose is the only thing you see" (93). That Dove scripts a more loving and romantic origin for the cultural mulatto and more overt romantic imagery can be read as perhaps a sign of decreased anxiety and a lifting of repression.

More importantly, in the ending to the second edition of Darker Face, Augustus now lives. In the first edition, his death represented the fear of censure by blacks that the cultural mulatto figure faces in the struggle over racial affiliation. Augustus chooses to affiliate with his white mother and is shot by the rebel blacks as a "traitor!" (140). In the second edition, Augustus has it both ways: He affiliates with his white mother, trying to stop her as she kills herself (159), and when the rebels charge in, they think he's killed her as they had ordered and so declare him a hero. He is placed on their shoulders and paraded around as a victorious leader (161-62).

In a recent interview, Dove explained how this final change developed:

That change came about because of my daughter [Aviva] who had participated in all of the sessions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She loved it, and would sit through all these rehearsals and make suggestions. It was great. One night I was still perturbed at the ending. I had put Phoebe in it, but I still just didn't like the way the insurrectionists came in, bang, bang, everyone was dead. So I was fiddling with it and she came down (she was supposed to be in bed) and I said to her, "I was just messing around with this ending." And she said, "You know, I think he should live. There are things worse than death." This is a twelve year old who really doesn't know what she's saying, but when she said that I suddenly realized, yeah, that's even worse. (Pereira interview 185-86)

For Dove, and for her daughter Aviva, this ending now makes sense because Augustus has ahead of him a tragic life of knowing he killed his father and had sex with his mother (Sophocles was right after all). But I would argue this revised ending speaks much more to Dove's concerns as a cosmopolitan artist and also as the mother of a racially mixed child. First, as an artist who has resolved her literary anxieties about African American censure over cultural amalgamation, Dove (in 1996) feels the cultural mulatto figure--an anxious expression of cosmopolitanism--can live. In fact, s/he can even be lauded as a hero. One can't help but wonder how much this final, ironic twist owes itself to Dove's current stature in African American literary circles, after little attention in the 1980s amid comments that she "writes white." (18) That this revision was supplied by Dove's own racially mixed daughter makes an interesting connection back to Dove's personal life: She, like Amalia, has borne a mulatto child--of course she would want that child to live, as would the child herself. Dedicating both editions to her daughter, alone, speaks to the positive future Dove sees for cosmopolitanism and the figure of the cultural mulatto (19) and suggests that, in the process of conceiving, writing, and rewriting Darker Face, Dove has finally expressed an artistic repression and now can align the ease about cultural amalgamation she has always found in her personal life with a newfound ease in her literary life.

Notes

(1.) A conversation I had years ago with Ronica Smucker, a former student of Dove's at the Notes University of Virginia, helped me begin thinking about Dove in connection with Ellis's essay.

(2.) In no way do I mean to suggest that Dove personally suffers from anxiety due to her cultural mixing: In fact, throughout her interviews and non-literary work she exhibits a high degree of personal comfort with her wide range of experiences. Furthermore, in my interview with her she specifically challenged the word mulatto in Trey Ellis's term "cultural mulatto" because she felt it indicated a kind of oppression. She, I think, sees cultural amalgamation much more positively in her personal identity than the word mulatto could indicate. The anxiety and repression I am focusing on here are literary and due to pressures brought to bear on her artistically. Whatever personal ease she feels about her identity, on some level of her artistic process an unconscious dis-ease works to create these conditions of anxiety, trauma, and repression due to racial protocols.

(3.) Cultural mixing may be only one of many possible primal scenes operating in African American literature. Holden-Kirwan's analysis of Beloved focuses on the Middle Passage as a primal scene, for example. I do not mean to suggest there is only one.

(4.) In making this claim, I have profited considerably from a critique of an earlier version of this essay by my colleague Tony Jackson, who urged me to separate out the kinds of miscegenation, both typologically and historically.

(5.) Dove's struggle with her first poetic presentation of herself as a cultural mulatto takes many other forms in The Yellow House on the Corner, none of which I have space to discuss here. My book manuscript on Dove includes a chapter on these issues in The Yellow House on the Corner.

(6.) See ch. 1 of Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism.

(7.) Incidently, some of these are present in "The Spray Paint King," the short story I identify as her Kunstlerroman, except for the hanky and incest, which eliminates it from my discussion here. But such a parallel underlines the importance of this image constellation in her early discourse and her self-concept as a cosmopolitan artist, which she thematizes through a cultural mulatto figure.

(8.) Thanks to my colleague Paula Connolly for pointing this out to me in a very helpful reading of this essay in draft.

(9.) Dove herself resists reading this poem as a demonstration of Beulah's incestuous relationship with her father, who reappears in several other poems in the section, although critics such as Lynn Keller read the possibility of incest as a likely and reasonable interpretation. See Pereira interview.

(10.) Elizabeth Beaulieu suggested this possibility at the George Moses Horton conference panel on Dove in 1998.

(11.) I myself experienced this "forgetting" the first time I taught Dove in a graduate seminar in 1995, having to be reminded by one of the participants, Gretchen Robinson, that this poem had a possible incest reading. Much of my piecing together of Dove's primal scene is my attempt to answer Ms. Robinson's very astute question that day, "Why is there so much incest in Dove's work?"

(12.) Madelyn Jablon sees Through the Ivory Gate as Dove's Kunstlerroman.

(13.) The "Prelude" to the novel offers a rewrite of Toni Morrison's doll motif in The Bluest Eye and its interrogation of white-defined female beauty. Dove confirms this inspiriting influence (Pereira interview 199).

(14.) In "writing her way back home," I am using Dove's own language from a 1994 interview with Emily Lloyd.

(15.) The opening of the play also signifies on Faulkner's bed image, as Eric Sundquist has noted: "Those beds [of Judith, Henry, and Quentin in Absalom, Absalom!], in figure and in fact, hide to the end the secret they appear to reveal, the secret that the whole burden of Faulkner's novel rests upon" (129)--namely, miscegenation. As Craig Werner has asserted, many African American writers have responded to Faulkner's work because of a shared "imperative to overhaul history" (32).

(16.) While some could argue that Dove's rewrite of African American origins participates in what Anthony Appiah has termed "alternative genealogizing," writing different versions of origins that don't change where we end up, Dove's text seems to believe, insofar as it follows a psychoanalytic project, that this expression of a repressed origin frees us from a symptomology of racial binarism.

(17.) Another way to read this, as I do in my book chapter on The Darker Face of the Earth, is as an acceptance of the black literary father of Amiri Baraka and of the Black Arts Movement, an influence repressed in her construction of a literary genealogy.

(18.) In fact, my own first exposure to Dove's poetry came via faculty in my white-dominated doctoral program in English, rather than in my African American Studies minor.

(19.) In a Kennedy Center interview in 1997, Dove described the play as "cathartic," rather than depressing. She elaborates: "What makes it not depressing is the fact that it's been articulated. I think that is what art does for us and why something that can be a tragedy can still lift you up. Because if you can articulate a fear--if someone can get it down so that you can see how it fits together--it becomes a little less frightening. It's the amorphous quality, the vagueness, the anxiety of fear that can paralyze us and truly depress us. But if you've got a name for it or if you can see it--like in a fable--it articulates particular experiences so that we can fit our dread into a matrix" ("At the Hands" 6).

Works Cited

"At the Hands of Fate: Writer Rita Dove Reveals the Genesis and Evolution of The Darker Face of the Earth." Interview. http://Kennedy-center.org/interviews/ritadove.html 19 Nov. 1997. 1-6.

Dove, Rita. The Darker Face of Earth. Brownsville: Storyline P, 1994.

---. The Darker Face of Earth. 2nd ed. Brownsville: Storyline P, 1996.

---. Fifth Sunday. Lexington: Callaloo Fiction Series, U of Kentucky, 1985.

---. Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon UP, 1986.

---. Through the Ivory Gate. New York: Random, 1992.

---. The Yellow House on the Corner. Pittsburgh: Camegie Mellon UP, 1989.

Ellis, Trey. "The New Black Aesthetic." Callaloo 12.1 (1989): 233-51.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Case of the Wolf Man." The Wolf Man. Ed. Muriel Gardiner. New York: Basic Books, 1971. 153-262.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Hammer, Mike, and Christina Daub. "Interview." Plum Review 9 (1996): 27-41.

Holden-Kirwan, Jennifer L. "Looking into the Self That Is No Self: An Examination of Subjectivity in Beloved." African American Review 32 (1998): 419-33.

Jablon, Madelyn. "The African-American Kunstlerroman." Diversity: A Journal of Multicultural Issues 2 (1994): 21-28.

Karenga, Maulana. "Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function." 1972. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: Norton, 1997. 1973-77.

Keller, Lynn. Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

Lloyd, Emily. "Navigating the Personal: An Interview with Poet Laureate Rita Dove." Off Our Backs: A Women's News Journal 24.4 (1994): 1+.

Lukacher, Ned. Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.

Pereira, Malin. "An Interview with Rita Dove." Contemporary Literature 40.2 (1999): 183-213.

---. Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.

Posnock, Ross. Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modem Intellectual. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Rampersad, Amold. "The Poems of Rita Dove." Callaloo 9.1 (1986): 52-60.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. "'Rememory': Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison's Novels." Contemporary Literature 31.3 (1990): 300-23.

Steffen, Therese. "The Darker Face of the Earth: A Conversation with Rita Dove." Transition 74 (1998): 104-23.

Sundquist, Eric J. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Werner, Craig Hansen. Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994.

Malin Pereira is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches African American and American literatures. She has published (before 1997 under the last name Walther) on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, and Rita Dove in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, African American Review, Contemporary Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. Her book Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

[c] 2002 Malin Pereira