Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century.

Challenging what he imagines to be a "resistance to theory where Afro-American women's literary and cultural studies are concerned," Houston A. Baker, Jr., has recently urged a move away from "a methodically historical mode of Black Studies," suggesting that poststructuralist theory can provide the critical tools needed for the study of black women's writing. While black feminist critics should (and do) use any number of methodologies in their work on African American women writers, Claudia Tate's stunning Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century makes it impossible to regard an historicized approach to the subject as simply a throwback to some previously completed stage of black feminist criticism. Rather, with this admirably researched, intelligently argued, highly readable study, Tate breaks new ground in theorizing the meaning and contexts of late nineteenth-century black women's writing.

Certainly earlier studies such as Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1980), by Barbara Christian; All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith; and Hazel V. Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987) have contributed to the recuperation of post-Reconstruction African American women's writing. At the same time, new critical interest in early texts has resulted in Oxford University Press's Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, under the general editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Still, when all is said and done, we hear the same litany of titles under scholarly examination: Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892). These texts continue to find favor not only because they raise intriguing questions about textual history and literary tradition, but also because they address directly the subject of nineteenth-century racial protest. Scholars generally seem at a loss, however, when it comes to racially indeterminate texts, novels such as Amelia E. Johnson's Clarence and Corinne; or, God's Way (1890) and The Hazeley Family (1894), whose characters are not even identifiably black, and whose plots do not appear to engage directly with the larger racial struggles that preoccupied black male writers during the same period.

With just such works as Clarence and Corinne and The Hazeley Family in mind, Tate attempts in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire to construct "a gendered and historicized model of interpretation" (70) with which to read the "black heroine's text" so often vilified for its single-minded focus on domesticity, courtship, and marriage. Besides the novels by Johnson and Harper, Tate includes Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins's Megda (1891) and Four Girls at Cottage City (1898); Katherine D. Tillman's Beryl Weston's Ambition: The Story of an Afro American Girl's Life (1893) and Clancy Street (1898); and Pauline Hopkins's four novels - Contending Forces (1900), Hagar's Daughter (1901), Winona (1902), and Of One Blood (1903). Rather than simply providing close readings, Tate works backwards from the novels to sketch out the cultural contexts which would have produced and sustained their formulaic plot structures.

In her introduction, Tate suggests that,

without an historicized interpretative model, the black domestic novels seem maudlin, inconsequential, even vacuous. But by regarding these texts from a reconstituted cultural perspective of African Americans of the post-Reconstruction era, that is, by reducing the "aesthetic distance" between our contemporary "horizon of expectation" and that of the novels' first readership, I attempt to discern the efficacy of the domestic genre for expressing the social desire and despair, the personal and political dreams and frustrations of late-nineteenth-century black people.(19)

According to Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, these texts appealed to "a distinct audience of ambitious black Americans who sought to live fully, despite their commonly experienced racial oppression"; the novels "encoded bourgeois constructions of the successful individual, community, and society to which that audience subscribed" (7) but which it constantly battled to preserve in the racist climate of late-nineteenth-century America. Hence the reason that, argues Tate, "these novels were especially satisfying during an era of intense racial violence" (6). Those already familiar with cultural studies on domesticity and the novel will recognize the theoretical influence here of Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1987), as well as Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), whose title Tate echoes with her own. Besides Carby, Tompkins, Armstrong, and certainly Nina Baym, (Women's Fiction [1976] and Novels, Readers and Reviewers [1984]), Tate draws on other sources, from Bakhtin to Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser on reader reception and aesthetics.

Beginning in the first two chapters, Tate uses Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Wilson's Our Nig to mark the legacy of domestic and maternal discourse on which post-Reconstruction texts draw. Meanwhile, Chapter Three addresses the roots of the modern critical attitude toward domesticity, color, romantic love, courtship, marriage, and sentimentalism as exemplified in texts such as Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Wright's Black Boy (1945). Working off of the "modern," ambivalent visions of marriage in Hurston's and Wright's texts, Tate argues that "what is missing" in our modern understanding "is the viewpoint of the post-Reconstruction domestic novels that marriage is a viable medium for developing the self, the other, and the community, a joint venture in which wives and husbands construct mutually fulfilling and productive futures while improving the quality of life in their community" (77). Precisely because current attitudes about the value and purpose of African American literature have been produced through an historicized process rooted in modernism's disaffection, and reformulated though the masculinist political agendas of the Black Arts Movement, Tate argues that "we contemporary readers have largely applauded the representation of freedom found in masculine black protest critiques or in an unconsciously male rendition of black cultural nationalism, while we have disparaged domestic stories as narratives of confinement, as narratives of status quo" (80). This lack of self-scrutiny, says Tate, produces our misreading of how political desire is structured in post-Reconstruction black female novels: Their social vision is not mediated through "the infrastructures of politics of state - civic, commercial, transport, and legislative politics," but through other sites of political intervention, namely "the church, school, and home" (86). What follows in Chapters Four through Seven is Tate's attempt to outline as fully as possible her reading of the allegory of the domestic evidenced in black women's texts of the 1890s.

According to Tate, we must recognize that even novels which focus solely on the domestic are "allegorical performances of political desire that (re)tell a surface story about an exemplary marriage and a deeper story about the social climate that would promote such a marriage. Hence the story about ideal family formation refers implicitly to another - a public discourse about an [idealized] equitable political system that distributes rewards on the basis of personal integrity, commitment, and hard work" (101). Thus, in novels which focus, for instance, on the marriage of a black heroine, the latter's move to domestic happiness is inscribed within a formulaic plot in which romantic love is tied not only to personal fulfillment and mutual respect between heterosexual partners, but also to a female-centered world with "an enlarged object of desire, the prosperity of the community as well as the family." As a result, "the desire for social equality, which these novels represent in domestic figuration, reflects black people's chronic quest for civil liberty, a quest that has been and continues to be fundamental to virtually all aspects of their lives." The fact that these novels unfailingly have happy endings, argues Tate, is not an attempt at escapism, but rather a function of a black readership's need for a representation of "discourses of desire satisfied, not deferred" (107).

While her explanations help to map out a logical cultural framework through which to read these novels and generalize about a verifiable trend in black women's fiction, Tate is quick to point out that the texts, though they follow a common pattern, do evince important variations. Thus she argues that Pauline Hopkins's three serialized novels after 1900 - Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood - speak to "the ultimate consequences of deteriorating race relations on black family life" (208), as the optimism of post-Reconstruction black readers diminished in the face of continual racial violence and little or no improvement in the struggle for civil rights. This shift in attitude, Tate argues, would foreground the literature of "domestic tragedy" to be found in the work of Angelina Weld Grimke in the 1920s: "Grimke's writings mark a place where the domestic plots of social optimism become outmoded, and explicit depictions of social alienation and racial protest commence to satisfy the expectations of twentieth-century black readers" (210). Hence Tate brings us full circle back to Hurston and Wright.

The end result of Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is a dazzling and convincing re-conceptualization of value and tradition with respect to a still-neglected body of work. After reading Tate's coverage of everything from the symbolic function of mulatto characters, to the use of widows in these texts, to the meaning of suppressed racial signifiers, we realize that what Tate has so brilliantly provided is a sophisticated theoretical framework on which we can continue to build - even those of us who feel more drawn to other poststructuralist approaches to African American women's writing.