Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History.

Janet Gabler-Hover. Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000. 208 pp. $34.95.

Let us recall the Genesis story of Hagar--the Egyptian slave entreated into concubinage with Abraham, with whom she conceives Ishmael. After Jehovah restores Sarah's reproductivity, Hagar is exiled though ominously "cheered" by an angel with promises of begetting a formidable but doomed race. Janet Gabler-Hover's Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History traces the instrumentalization of this Hagar figure in several nineteenth-century" "women's" novels: E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Deserted Wife (1849) and Virginia and Magdalene (1851), Harriet Marion Stephens's Hagar the Martyr (1855), Charlotte Moon Clark's The Modern Hagar (1882), and Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's Daughter (1901-1902). With a chapter devoted to close readings of each of these novels, the book offers fresh insight into the way that Southern white women novelists have deployed Hagar as a complexly racialized yet empowering icon of female imagination and endurance in the face of male brutality and abandonment.

However, the transracial solidarity among women that the Hagar trope effects is only temporary, since most of these authors, according to Gabler-Hover, only "dream" of a black Hagar as long as it suits their purposes, and swiftly re-race her in order to impugn black femininity. Most compelling in this transference is the ironic redemption of a pro-slavery South through the unlikely agency of authors imagining themselves to be black. Thus Dreaming Black/Writing White exposes a hitherto obscure facet of the tendency to fetishize blackness that Toni Morrison finds at the heart of our national literature and which Gabler-Hover discovers at the core of antebellum America's literary and visual culture.

Building on the work of black feminist theologians Savina J. Teubal in Hagar the Egyptian: The Lost Tradition of the Matriarchs (1990) and Dolores Williams in Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (1993), Gabler-Hover's study charts the progress of the Hagar myth in nineteenth-century literature and art while cleverly making the case that the Hagar archetype does not simply trope through antebellum culture, but actually defines for itself a "Hagar canon." Indeed, as they are laid out here, the thirteen or so retellings of the Hagar tale do seem to open up a particularized generic space. At the very least they all follow a standard plot trajectory which Gabler-Hover cogently outlines, beginning with a white heroine's figural appropriation of blackness and ending with her expurgation and subsequent excoriation of the same. The Hagar canon ultimately rivals, plays against, and signifies on Southern domestic, sentimental, and tragic mulatto fictions. And yet Gabler-Hover's two most intrig uing arguments--that these collections of tropologically related works do indeed constitute a canon, and that the discursive race mixing, identifying, and disidentifying that they contain revises other pro-slavery inscriptions of race found in tragic mulatto fiction--crystalize only in the last chapter, dealing with Hopkins. Like so many of the book's strengths, these points are not given enough attention or stated so boldly as they should be, even though the book elsewhere alleges much more audacious claims less central to the project at hand--such as the suggestion that Hawthorne "began a feverish renewal of his writing career with the Scarlet Letter in September 1849" after reading Southworth's Hagar and engrafting his Hester Prynne therefrom.

The strength of the study lies in its careful and impressive handling of the convoluted race changing that Hagar plots entail. Despite her associative blackness (Egyptian ethnicity), the richly ambiguous and hybridized Hagar is almost always a white but swarthy outcast who becomes metaphorically black when imagined outside of the moral and reproductive economy of patriarchy, but who undergoes a cleansing ritual that expels her blackness and reasserts her white supremacist purity. In all of these fictions except for Hopkins's, African Americaness is obliterated as a textual precondition for the redemption of the Edenic South, and black womanhood in particular is retooled as "the evacuated vessel through which white women's creativity is born." And as if simply disentangling the psychodynamic threads of these complicated denouements were not enough, Gabler-Hover also makes effective use of Homi Bhabha's notion of "splitting": Hagar's illicit sexuality is split onto blackness, but its product, the empowerment t hat such sexuality makes possible, is split onto whiteness. Thus, as the argument unravels fictional race changes, it also supplies lucid case studies exemplifying Bhabha's quite sophisticated trope of postcolonial subject formation. Hagar is "white enough to allow white women authors and readers to imagine themselves in the role of sexual and political rebellion against the patriarchy, but at the same time black enough to provide them with an escape hatch through which such rebellion could be safely disavowed."

The eclectic implementation of critical discourses which often makes Gabler-Hover's approach fresh and exciting, however, at other times renders her argument needlessly abstruse--and, at still others, just plain wrong. During an otherwise keen investigation of visual depictions of Hagar, Gabler-Hover somewhat predictably refers to the groundbreaking feminist visual theories of Mieke Bal. But by repeatedly misgendering Bal as "him" in her commentary, Gabler-Hover does more than simply misinterpret an admittedly ambiguous name, she misconstrues the strong feminist agenda inherent to Bal's methodologies which unconventionally seek free play between verbal and figural domains. Perhaps as a result of this seemingly trivial oversight, these sections seem always on the brink of revealing so much more about Hagar's figuration between genres than Gabler-Hover is finally able to convey, so that while the reader is bedazzled by Gabler-Hover's discoveries, as in the introduction which "outs" famed illustrator John Audub on as black, we are also left groping for explicit connections back to Hagar.

Nevertheless, Dreaming Black/Writing White is an eminently readable study that challenges prevailing notions about race changes, amplifies our understanding of the tropological connections in Pauline Hopkins's novel (the only text still in print) to white Southern antecedents, and argues for the positive, albeit limited affiliations possible when whites appropriate blackness.