Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics.

Readings of Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) have often focused on the text's racial and gender problems, either critiquing the text's failure to measure up to the racial consciousness and feminism evident in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) or reversing this critique by claiming that Seraph's power lies in its heavily coded championing of its protagonist, Arvay Meserve. [1] Janet St. Clair observes that "Seraph on the Suwanee has been virtually ignored by all but authors of full-length studies of Hurston, and even they generally scurry across its surface in consternation" (39). Among the critics' anxieties are the fact that Arvay is not a "feminist" heroine (or even "likable"), the text's complicated and problematic treatment of rape, Hurston's conscious prioritization of white characters, and the oftentimes stagnant narrative which accompanies Arvay's psychic turmoil. While this tendency on the part of critics has very recently been reversed, [2] I would suggest that Seraph's racial and gender problematics can open up the text to further critical assessment and cultural critique. Critics have long been aware of the non-conformity of Hurston as both an author and a public persona during the Harlem Renaissance. [3] Does it come as any surprise that Seraph on the Suwanee throws a wrench into the works? If Seraph messes up or, say, whitewashes what might otherwise be a rather clean record for Hurston's writing of complex, black folk characters, then perhaps it is with the notions of "mess" and "wash" that we should approach not only Hurston's most problematic fiction, but also her other writings.

Scholars familiar with Hurston's writing know that representations of washing and cleanliness recur in her work, perhaps most significantly in Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), the brilliant "Gilded Six-Bits" (1933), and "Sweat" (1926). I will not offer a full analysis of these texts here, but instead mention them to establish a comparative element that can be traced throughout Hurston's writing. Jonah's Gourd Vine, for instance, begins with the image of washing on a large scale, and suggests its double meaning as it relates to domestic work and spiritual purging: "'Ole Massa gwinter scrub floors tuhday,'" remarks Amy Crittenden, as she spies rain clouds and senses an impending storm (3). This observation is followed by the argument between Amy and her husband Ned, which leads to the casting out of Amy's first-born (bastard) mulatto son John (Buddy Crittenden) Pearson, around whom the novel revolves. Hurston spins a narrative of John's personal, spiritual purity (both marital and sexual) and leads us through the wa y in which John's community first welcomes, then rejects, and finally re-integrates him. Just before John's much noted (spiritually cleansing) sermon in Chapter 24, rot and purgation find poignant expression: "He felt inside as if he had been taking calomel. The world had suddenly turned cold. It was not new and shiny and full of laughter. Mouldy, maggoty, full of suckholes--one had to watch out for one's feet" (144). Such imagery typifies the way in which Hurston delves into the combined abjection of the body, the psyche, and the world in which her characters move.

Similarly, "The Gilded Six-Bits" opens with Missie May "bathing herself in the galvanized washtub in the bedroom" (985). In "Six-Bits" it is the female character who negotiates her sexual and spiritual purity and her emotional abjection after her husband Joe catches Missie May in the act of adultery with Slemmons. The overlapping themes of value (both personal and economic) and cleanliness (both domestic and spiritual) again point to the way in which Hurston frames some of her best stories with the resolution of radical oppositions, and how the narrative middles dwell in the mess and tension of binary breakdowns.

The intertwining of race and gender with bodily and psychological impurities suggests that a turn toward psychoanalysis might assist in interpreting Hurston's work. [4] A brief gloss on the psychoanalytics of race, gender, sexuality, and laundry in the short story "Sweat" provides a deeper inter-text for reading Hurston's textual "messes." In "Sweat," it is important to notice the insertion of three key images as the narrative unfolds: dirt, the whip, and the snake. These images are not simply sexual ones, but each has implications for the writing of race and gender in the narrative as well. As in Jonah and "The Gilded Six-Bits," "Sweat" begins with a scene of washing: Delia Jones, a "washwoman," "squat[s] in the kitchen floor beside the great pile of clothes, sorting them into great heaps according to color" (955). We are told later that these are specifically "white folks' clothes" and that Delia's cheating, abusive husband Sykes reacts violently to her bringing white folks' laundry into their home (956). Hurston introduces Sykes into the text as he dangles "something long, round, limp and black" which "slither[s] to the floor beside her":

A great terror took hold of her. It softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it was a full minute before she could cry out or move. Then she saw it was the big bull whip her husband liked to carry when he drove. She lifted her eyes to the door and saw him standing there bent over with laughter at her fright. She screamed at him.

"Sykes, what you throw dat whip on me like dat? You know it would skeer me--looks just like a snake, an' you knows how skeered Ah is of snakes." (955)

The snake-like whip which Sykes uses to terrorize the laboring Delia takes on further racial/psychosexual meaning in relation to the next alarming scene:

He stepped roughly upon the whitest pile of things, kicking them helter-skelter as he crossed the room. His wife gave a little scream of dismay, and quickly gathered them together again. (956; emphasis added)

The story goes on to detail the difficult relationship between Delia and Sykes, incorporating a narrative of sexual infidelity (as in "The Gilded Six-Bits," only with a reversal of genders). In the mix of dirt, whiteness, snakes, whips, and, of course, sweat, an interesting gesture toward a racial/psychoanalytic paradigm is made. For even though racial whiteness does not exist in corporeal form in the story, its abstraction into metonymy (white folks' dirty laundry) complicates the meaning of whiteness and cleanliness, especially as they relate to the threatening whip. Sykes's whip, which Delia mistakes for a snake, carries with it the historical weight of slavery (corporeal, economic, and regional). Readers keep this in mind when they finally come across the actual snake which Sykes hides in a soap box near the story's close: The whip/snake cannot simply be reduced to a phallic symbol.

The brutal irony of the story lies in the twist at its close. The snake planted by Sykes to scare (and possible kill) Delia instead bites and kills Sykes. The end of Sykes is not merely the cleansing away of oppressive male violence, for what is Sykes but a clever troping off of the word psyche? Just as Hurston plays with the variable construction of both "psyches" and "Sykes," she also resists a traditional ("pure" or "white") psychoanalytic paradigm of sexuality and the body, insisting on the way in which differing constructions of race and gender change (or misspell?) the psychic meanings of each.

Ironically, a focus on the pure/impure binary when reading Hurston's work overlaps with the way in which critics and reviewers received her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee. As we shall see, related binaries emerge around Seraph: good/bad, useful/wasteful, valuable/trash. Annette Trefzer importantly notices a trend in Seraph criticism, one in which "racial and gender strategies refuse to be 'useful' for any explicitly ethnocentric canon which privileges certain 'major' works to represent its ideology" (51-52). Seraph's status as a "minor" or "unuseful" work of Hurston's thus marks it, in contemporary criticism, as the problematically "bad" text in the Hurston oeuvre. Such an evaluation, interestingly, not only relates to the text thematically (what I argue the text is about), but also recapitulates the historical events which surround its publication. In Hazel V. Carby's 1991 "Foreword" to the novel, the reader learns that, while the initial sales of the book "were good," a particular event "created contro versy around the novel and shattered Hurston's optimism.... On September 13[, 1948], Hurston had been arrested on charges rising from allegations of sexual misconduct with a ten-year-old boy." Carby informs us that the media misused Hurston's novel as "a tool in the publicity that was eventually generated against her." While Hurston was cleared of these charges, the text was marked by the media as evidence of "sexual aggressiveness in women" and used to show "evidence of the author's immorality" (xiii). [5] Seraph, therefore, moved from a "good" text which received "favorable if not overly enthusiastic" reviews to a "bad" text which incriminated its author by generating a narrative of culpability and "perversion" (xii-xiii).

The trashing of Hurston and Seraph by the media in 1948, as well the more recent critiques of and/or indifference to the novel, provides an interesting history of the novel, one in which this article seeks to intervene. Working from a class-conscious and psychoanalytic interpretive frame, this article moves the novel into a different light by deconstructing the politics of "trash" which are found both within and outside of Seraph. The irony involved in the text's status as that which has been "trashed" by critics, from its publication up until very recent analyses, establishes an historical context which extends over the text's writing of the moody, "white trash" heroine Arvay (Henson) Meserve. The white trash which Arvay embodies functions as a racial and class trope which combines the clean-dirty binary with racial and class-based identity. In order to understand the full meaning of Arvay, her white trash identity, and its implication for African American cultural politics, I will connect Hurston's novel w ith narratives of anthropological eugenics and incorporate readings of the abject white body to show how waste and whiteness figure into Hurston's fiction. In the broader context of eugenic anthropology, I submit, Seraph's tracing of destitution, motherhood, class mobilization, and excretion shows how, for Hurston, racial categories always intersect with other categories, and the fluidity of the body always messes up any clean and proper understanding of the self.

Whiteness and Eugenics

In her study of race and motherhood, Laura Doyle reminds us that "the era of the Harlem Renaissance and of modernism was also the era of eugenics" (10). [6] Particularly from 1900 to 1940, eugenics had a broad impact on U.S. political culture, igniting debates about race and racism, national purity and national progress. A cultural paranoia over defective germ-plasm helped to shape a national conversation about how good and bad marriages and selective breeding might effect the strength of a (white) American future. Early-twentieth-century uneasiness about lower-class whites overpopulating the nation led to a panicked organization of public and private research which could eugenically chart lines of white families. Eugenic reports on white rural poor-including maps, tables, diagrams, and their analyses--advanced an ideology of wasteful or weak human stock; the cultural moment of American eugenics both influenced and was influenced by a common-sense racial logic which associated "whiteness" with the clean and t he good, the pure and the pleasing.

Since at least the mid-1990s, a market has opened for critical studies on racial whiteness in the humanities. The most familiar arguments (those by Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and Richard Dyer) foreground the common-sense connection of racial whiteness with an aesthetic gorgeousness, critiquing the way in which whiteness is easily collapsed into the clean, the pure, and the racially unmarked. [7] Toni Morrison, among others, calls for the "examin[ation of] the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered" the effect of racist inflection on the subject (11). Many critics ask, along with Morrison, "What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as 'American'?" (9). A good question. Perhaps by establishing an affinity between eugenic narratives of bad blood and Hurston's novel about "white trash" we can tease out what it means for white Americ a to want to purge its supposedly "impure" elements.

Although eugenics, as a discourse, shifts from "negative" to "positive" poles, family studies and bulletin reports from the Eugenics Records Office in the early twentieth century conceptualize social eugenics as a progressive, racial uplift project. [8] In the ERO's 1914 Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting off the Defective GermPlasm in the American Population, Harry H. Laughlin summarizes, "The committee will point out what appears as the result of study to be 'the best practical means,' so far as innate traits are a factor, of purging the blood of the American people of the handicapping and deteriorating influences of [defective] anti-social classes" (6). That is, the "purging of blood" from (pure) white America meant eliminating "deteriorating" influences, influences which could be spotted-by eugenical "experts"-directly on the "deteriorating" white body. In most cases, this included deformity, feeble-mindedness, albinism, alcoholism, miscegenation, and cr iminality. The interpretation of white grotesquery as a signifier of an inherited interior pollution would produce what Nicole Hahn Rafter calls a "White Trash myth" ("Introduction" 30) [9] According to Rafter, this myth was also linked to rural geographic areas where an overabundance of white trash communities thrived: mountains, pine-lands, swamps, woods, hills, ravines (7).

Social-scientific measurings of these populations--from the obsessive detailing of bodies, vitalities, and diseases to the charting of occupations, feelings, intelligences, and sexualities--sought to block their reproduction in order to ensure a "pure" white race for the future of "America." [10]

Perhaps Hurston's interest in writing about the white rural poor of Florida stemmed not only from a desire to "break the rules" concerning blacks writing only about blacks, and not merely to "pander to white readers," but to put into fiction a working knowledge of the way in which certain whites were being characterized in anthropological studies. [11] While there is no material link between Hurston's fictional and anthropological work and eugenic family studies, thematic similarities between the two suggest a broad cultural overlap that one might not immediately suspect. We do know, for example, that, working under Franz Boas, Hurston spent time gathering measurements of black Harlemites' bodies in the late 1920s. [12] But it is the research and writing which Hurston did in Florida, under the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project, which most strongly links Hurston with the white trash narratives of the eugenicists. As John Lowe explains, "Although Hurston certainly knew some Crackers when she was growing up, her most intense scrutiny of this group came much later, after she had become both a practicing folklorist and novelist accustomed to noting the intricacies of sociological and anthropological detail as a member of the Federal Writers' Project in 1938-39" (265). In her collection of Hurston's FWP writings, Pam Bordelon also argues that "the massive FWP research engine supplied background material for Hurston's last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, a seminal connection that has never been established. Indeed, the connection between Hurston's FWP experience and Seraph is so complete that one can find passages where Hurston lifted sentences from her FWP field notes and placed them in the mouths of her novel's characters" (x). [13] Hurston's direct involvement with the documentation and study of Florida Crackers from an anthropological perspective stands in mimetic relation to descriptive accounts of the "cacogenic" authorized in ERO reports. As we shall see, Hurston's Seraph both participates in and resists--perhap s even at times parodies--a eugenic ideology of tainted blood.

Eugenic field work relied heavily on the reading of the badly-gened ("cacogenic") body. "Expert" eugenicists were trained to map a narrative of degeneracy onto the white body whose health was impaired or failing, thereby establishing an imaginary equation between the disfigured body and the inbred body, the impoverished body and the licentious body, and so on. For eugenicists, economic and emotional disenfranchisement conflate, marking the body of the "weak" or "feebleminded" poor white as always already polluted, nonproductive, and genetically unfit. Eugenic narratives sharpen the focus on the ways in which anthropologists articulate a "science" of the white trash body.

In "The Family of Sam Sixty" (1916), eugenic researcher Mary Storer Kostir traces the criminal lineage of one rural Ohio "moron." (Kostir uses the pseudonym Sixty both to re-name her subject and reflect the subject's IQ.) After much labeling and observation, Kostir concludes that "we have striking evidence of the inheritance of low mentality. Feeble-minded parents have feeble-minded children" (207-08). Some of the "striking evidence" includes a description of Jim, Sam Sixty's brother, who "looks brutal and degenerate. His neck is as wide as his head. His right eye is deeper set than his left. His nose and mouth deviate to the right. He is said to be feeble-minded" (191). Sam Sixty's wife Pearl "comes of bad stock. She is said to be slovenly and untidy." Their first child, a daughter, was "trained in immorality by her [incestuous] relations with her father, and, by the example of her mother, she began a life of prostitution. Taken from this and placed in a good family, she soon became pregnant, and accused a married man in the neighborhood of being responsible for her condition. The man had always borne a good reputation" (193). Contemporary readers might balk at this eugenic family tree, with its reliance on the grotesquery of deeply set eyeballs and natural decrepitude; however, it is precisely from these particularities that eugenics maintained its ideological force.

Notice, once more, the attention given to the grotesque body in a description of two of Sam Sixty's paternal cousins: "The second boy was placed in a good home, but as he grew older, he became ugly to his benefactor, and finally left him.... The third boy has been placed with good people. He, too, is ugly and undependable. He is unquestionably feeble-minded" (197; emphasis added). Another (distant) relative "is subject to fits [epilepsy?] as are several of her relatives" (200). Accounts of inherited shiftlessness, violence, hysterical fits, deformities, and feeble-mindedness recur throughout this narrative, which Kostir chalks up to "brains incapable of growing up like those of ordinary people. With this handicap, it is impossible to instill into them self-control" (207). The solution?

If the community deals intelligently with such people... it will recognize the fundamental deficiency in intelligence and will provide permanent custody for such persons. In custody they will produce more and be much happier, and at the same time, will not be producing broods of feeble-minded dependents.... Preventive medicine must come to the aid of courts and schools in this work of saving the social waste.... genealogical charts [such] as these, with the mental facts and social data which accompany them, are arguments which convince the fair-minded that, some control by society of the increase of the human family is imperative.... society has the right to take measures to prevent some individuals from becoming parents, because society pays taxes. (207-09; bold emphasis added, italics Kostir's)

To paraphrase, the "social waste" of the (white) race must be cleaned up, washed out, or flushed from the system in order to preserve a healthy, orderly nation of white taxpayers. It is interesting to me, as perhaps it was to Hurston, that white-on-white racial discourse (eugenic theory) makes use of a cleansing metaphor, as if the whiteness of whites cannot be white enough, but must be purged and sterilized until any "one" who makes a mess of it has been eliminated.

Public and Private Abjection

To posit the body as a metaphor for socio-political or psychological systems is nothing new. However, the articulation of white class differences in the language of waste and pollution indicates that a modernist anxiety about the white body--in an increasingly self-conscious multi-ethnic, multi-racial America--produces the specter of white trash precisely because bourgeois whites might not be able to figure intra-racial differences as anything other than a clinging, yet not quite palpable, abjection. Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection theorizes the way in which the not-so-simple binaries of clean/dirty, pure/impure, and self/other circle around the clinging, sticky phenomenon of "abjection." As we shall see, the self's psychic relation to the other depends upon the dizzying effects of abjection, which both affects and infects the political and psychological meanings of race, class, and corporeal differences. [14]

Kristeva articulates the difficulty of securing a meaningful identity in a mess of interior organs, bodily tissues, and open orifices: "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable....what is abject...is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses" (1-2). How and where does this sense of exclusion, this collapse of meaning manifest itself?

Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protects me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck....These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. (2-3)

Any object which threatens the stability of what Kristeva calls "my own and clean self" points toward psychic abjection. That which jeopardizes the security of the dualistic nature of the "I" (speaking subject) and the body (spoken subject) signifies a horror of notknowing, a blurring of the body's borders: Where do(es) "I" stop and "the world" begin? For Kristeva, disgust and repulsion wrack the body only so that a more coherent ego can exist, so that the body can say "I" fully knowing that which it is not (not corpse, not waste, not shit, not a horrifying mess of incoherency). The very private signifiers of abjection (bodily fluids, filth) bleed over into the public realm for Kristeva, who imagines that "it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (4).

We see in Kostir's conclusions about Sam Sixty that eugenic writings posit unfit white bodies as "social waste," a phantasmagoric public horror which must be controlled. Kristeva turns to Mary Douglas's anthropological studies to strengthen the connection between private and public abjection [15].

...religious rites are purification rites whose function is to separate this or that social, sexual, or age group from one another, by means of prohibiting a filthy, defiling element . . . Defilement is what is jettisoned from the "symbolic system." It is what escapes rationality, that logical order on which asocial aggregate is based, which then becomes differentiated from a temporary agglomeration of individuals and, in short, constitutes a classification system or a structure" (65; bold emphasis added, italics Kristeva's)

What we can learn from Kristeva and Douglas, then, is the way in which eugenics worries the relation between the private white body and the public, social body of whiteness. The moment of anthropological eugenics works to signify "white trash" culture as the defiling element of white America, polluting not only genetically, but structurally as well. That is, under the eugenic gaze, the cacogenic family blocks biological and intellectual "progress" while simultaneously threatening to taint the purity of racial and economic categories. A normalized white body functions as an icon for the white race, which must keep itself clean, avoid abjection, and, to be blunt, get rid of its shit. [16]

Hurston's Excremental Subjects, Objects

1. Sawley/Arvay

Hurston's attention to cleaning ad laundry and scrubbing and psychological "suckholes" in her fiction takes an interesting turn in her final novel. Seraph, too, embeds signifiers of cleanliness, dirt, and purging. Only unlike all of her other writings, Seraph is specifically about poor whites. Hurston uses racial whiteness as a main-frame for this story so that she can treat dirt and trash as they correspond with differences between (white) economic classes and between (white) genders. The iconicity of a eugenically perfect white body-a Bahktinian "classical" body which shows no ruptures or orifices, which is smooth and whole-transforms in Hurston's Seraph into a more grotesque, white trash body--one which eats, copulates, gives birth, defecates, and is melancholic. [17] Grotesquery surfaces in Seraph not only as a public abjection of poor whites, but also, as we shall see, in the private abjection of Arvay's body. In order to understand Arvay's position within the community more fully, we can turn to the way in which Hurston begins her novel, with a description of Sawley's white folks.

The impoverished community of Sawley, Florida, closely resembles descriptions of white trash populations found in eugenic reports, right down to the "the haunts of the cacogenic [which] become outer manifestations of their inner decay" (Rafter, "Introduction" 27).

The life of Sawley streamed out from the sawmill and the "teppentime" still. Then, too, there was ignorance and poverty, and the ever-present hookworm. The farms and the scanty flowers in front yards and in tin cans and buckets looked like the people.... Brock Henson[, Arvay's father,] was a Cracker from way back. . . . [He] had never made as much as a hundred dollars in any month of his life. The family lived in a clapboard house more than two miles east of the heart of Sawley.... [The house] was now a rusty, splotchy gray-brown. Only one room in the house, the parlor, was ceilinged overhead. In the two bedrooms and the kitchen, the rafters were bare and skinny. (1-9).

The "scanty flowers in tin cans" which resemble the people of Sawley alert us to the way in which economic and corporeal abjection will, indeed, overlap for Hurston, too. The white folks in Sawley match their surroundings, serve as a kind of "local color" for the backdrop of the novel. However, Hurston writes out a "white trash myth" only in order to explore more fully how this myth evolves, to delve into the problematics of race and class as each comes to describe a community.

The language of the first chapter, as well as its narrative voice, situates Arvay (her body and her psyche) as Other to the rest of the community. The first chapter begins with Arvay's public humiliation, a humiliation of which only the reader--and not the community at large--knows intimately. The narrator confides that Arvay suffers from extreme anxiety over her sister 'Raine's marriage to the Reverend Carl Middleton, and that severe feelings of inadequacy prevent her from entering into the public system of heterosexual courtship. When brash and handsome Jim Meserve blows into town and fauns over the fragile Arvay, it is not with timidity or shyness that Arvay responds, but with shock and outrage. Thus, Arvay is not escorted, but "scorched" to Sunday services by the newly-arrived Jim (24). The public spectacle that is her body-in-courtship sets her apart from the rest of the town--a community represented as tightly-knit and busy-bodied, "a big red ants' nest that had been ploughed up" (3). This crawling, un derground, biting community likes to gossip about Arvay, who, even within the "other" community of rural poor whites, gets figured as Other herself, one who is "queer, if not a little 'tetched'" (6). Arvay's hostility toward Jim stems from her knowledge that she is, indeed, a public "laughing-stock" (16), the butt of a community joke.

It is important to notice that the narrative voice in the first chapter shifts from historian to tour-guide, and finally approximates a voice close to Arvay herself. So as the reader learns from the narrator details about local architecture, food, and diseases, s/he also gets a personal and folksy sense of who Arvay is: "Arvay looked like her mother's folks, even had her mother's ways to a certain extent.... The old heads recalled that Maria Henson[, Arvay's mother,] had been given to fits and spasms in her girlhood the same way Away was right now" (6). (This connection between Arvay and her mother is a critical one-to which this essay will return.) For the rest of the novel, the narrator will remain close by Arvay, taking the reader not only through the material world of her marriage to Jim and their rise into the middle class, but also through the emotional "suckholes" which threaten to swallow Arvay as she makes sense of her surroundings. Even though Arvay's inherited "fits" finally (and dramatically) cea se (thanks to Jim), "queer" spasms and contortions continue as an interior phenomenon. That is, even though Jim has helped to "cure" Arvay's seizures with a "joke" (32), her compulsion to convulse will play out as a psychological angst, occasioned by the abjection of her body in the form of excretory anxiety and childbirth.

2. Earl

For all of Arvay's anxieties about marrying Jim, it is the birth of their first child, Earl, which lets loose a slew of insecurities about her white trash self--both her poor white ancestry and her interiorized feelings of sexual guilt and shame. Nicole Hahn Rafter reminds us that, for eugenicists, "each negative trait was interpreted as a sign of the family's degenerative tendency and evidence that the tendency was hereditary" ("Introduction" 8-9). Arvay tells herself that Earl, her deformed and "feeble-minded" boy, must represent" 'the punishment for the way I used to be'"(69). The delivery of the grotesque baby suggests that Arvay's inherited "degenerative tendencies" and her silent guilt (over Carl Middleton) have become flesh and have been purged from her body. Chapter 5 describes the birth of Earl:

"Dessie! Dessie! What is the matter with my child's hands?"

"Them don't look much like fingers. do they?"

"Good gracious! They look more like strings. And his hands, Dessie. Why they look too little for his body."

There was practically no forehead nor backhead on her child. The head narrowed like an egg on top.... The feet were long, and the toes were well formed, but they looked too long for a new-born baby to have. And there was no arch to the tiny feet. They were perfectly flat, with a little lump of flesh huddled under what should have been the instep.... He certainly did not favor Jim. Who did it remind her of? Finally she knew. He looked like her Uncle Chester, her mother's youngest brother. The one they seldom talked about. The one who was sort of queer in his head. (67-68)

The "way [Arvay] used to be" refers to both Arvay's personal past and economic/cultural heritage. Arvay connects Earl with her "former" (Cracker) self; Earl's resemblance to "queer" Uncle Chester connects him to a maternal line of bad blood. But Arvay also needs to read Earl as a sign, and oscillates between eugenics and psychology. Just as she wants to link Earl with a maternal uncle and rationalize a eugenic discourse of heredity, Arvay also wants to believe that Earl is punishment for shameful sexual desires for Carl Middleton. For Arvay, Earl stands for both sexual guilt and cacogenicity, an ontogenic and phylogenic signifier.

Although Arvay reacts in horror upon seeing Earl's body for the first time, she decides, quickly, that "the baby's defects only increased [her] love for it" (69). As Arvay oils and massages the mutated baby's body, molding his head and feet into whatever shape she can, she decides to name the child Earl:" 'I mean to get ahead of Jim and name the baby my ownself. It's natural for a man to want the first boy named after him, but I always loved the name Earl David...' " (70). Arvay's power to name Earl suggests Jim's hesitation to accept Earl as his own, clean, first-born son. The name Earl is a literal mutation of Carl, which differs only in the spelling or shaping of the first letter (E instead of C). Since Arvay's body processes her past in the experience of abjection, then it only makes sense that the disabled Earl is an uncanny double of Carl, a figure who Arvay must learn to love and, eventually, of whom Arvay must learn to let go. Earl, then, suggests 'early' and/or 'earn'; and his naming allows Arvay, f or once, to "get ahead of Jim." Earl, as a signifier, embodies that which Arvay must recognize as both terrible and important from her earlier life in the turpentine camps so that she may earn the privilege of something more healthy and complete. [18]

Earl's abject(ed) body works as a site in which the white family falls into crisis. His other-ed body gets inscribed as that which transgresses, and therefore threatens, the bourgeois white family. Although Earl is silent, we do know that he "attack[s] ferociously when put to the breast" (68) and that his first (perhaps only) word is "either 'eat' or 'meat'" (76). Unlike Arvay, the reader might recognize that Earl is not trying to reference a bodily function or a source of protein, but rather he is trying to say his own name. Instead, what comes out is an ambiguous, half-formed desire: not "Earl" or "me," but "eat," "meat." Earl's deformed white body can incorporate food but cannot speak; he cannot use language properly to define himself in relation to others, cannot carve out a normative white subjectivity.

If Earl hyperbolizes Arvay's inability to express orally her feelings of class inadequacy or sexual shame, then her explosion in the following scene more than makes up for her previous silences. In this scene, Arvay rages against Jim's privileging of their more eugenically sound children, Angeline and Kenny, reading the problematic white family as symptomatic of larger class and racial structures:

"You[, Jim,] come from some big high muck-de-mucks, and we[, Arvay and Earl,] ain't nothing but piney-woods Crackers and poor white trash. Even niggers is better than we is, according to your kind.... Earl is always wrong because he's like my folks. 'Taint never nothing wrong with Angeline and Kenny because they take after your side." (126)

Arvay's emphasis on the hierarchical constructions of race and class demonstrates how the rural, poor, "cacogenic" white family does not fit neatly into the black-white binary." 'Even niggers is better than we is'" signifies the racially degraded relationship between what has been constructed in the novel as other: "white trash" and "niggers." Hurston re-presents a racial hierarchy here which can be read as that which places "big high" whiteness at the top, assumes "niggers" is always already lowly or "trash," and that "white trash" either verges on or entirely falls beneath the construction of this "blackness." So if Earl is "always wrong because he's like [Arvay's] folks," then his "wrong" whiteness ("nothing but piney-woods Crackers and poor white trash") taints the assumed purity of "right" whiteness. Arvay articulates these differences within whiteness itself with a passion the reader has not seen since Jim "scorched" her home from church at the novel's beginning. Her articulation of how economic differe nces get written on the body paves the way for a more personalized sense of her body as something which falls outside the (white) norm.

3. Falling Outside of the White Body

As I posited earlier, the way in which metaphors of private abjection ooze over into the public realm oftentimes depends on racial and class-based fantasies which equate personal cleanliness with social perfection. Cracker and white trash can be thought of as terms which implicate the impure body in systems of racial and class division. The conjuring of an impure body, a white body which must rid itself of trash, speaks to a specifc metaphor of bodily fluids and waste. Elizabeth Grosz draws from Julia Kristeva to think about the relation of the excremental object to the excrementalized subject:

Faeces ... signif[ies] that the opposition between the clean and the unclean draws on the distinction between the body's inside and its outside. Inside the body, it is the condition of the body's ability to regenerate itself; as expelled and external it is unclean, filthy. The subject is implicated in this waste, for it can never be definitively and permanently externalized; it is the subject; it cannot be completely expelled. (Grosz 91)

If we join Grosz's theory of the fecal with the political semiotics of white trash, then we can see how a particular race and class combination produces an excremental identity category. "Whiteness" as a whole, unfragmented, self-same cultural body must abject its "trash" to re-establish its cleanliness and coherency. And, yet, in doing so, racial whiteness cannot completely expel its degraded white other because of the sameness which figures race based on a visible economy. That is, in racist social formation, the eugenic "white ideal" can only anxiously conceive of itself as "pure" because the contaminating (white) other will never be eliminated by virtue of its structural (white) similarity.

The scene in which Arvay is stuck in the bathroom when one of her eugenically sound children, Kenny, calls to report that he will not be returning home literalizes the excremental metaphor. Arvay's constipation in Chapter 21 works as a double metaphor for her repression of both her poor white heritage and her experience of maternity. The Meserves' new porch functions as Arvay's special annex so that, spatially and psychologically, this territory gives her room to "visit the graveyard of years and dig up dates and examine them cheerfully. It was a long, long way from the turpentine woods to her sleeping-porch" (234). [19]

Before the construction of the porch, Arvay's excretory system functions irregularly. The porch serves as a "private space" in which to "lounge around and wait for the event of her day." The following description provides the reader with more information regarding Arvay's body:

For the last year or so, she had been a little too bound for her usual good health. So her doctor had given her a routine to overcome this.... He was against laxatives and the castor oil mixed with turpentine that Arvay had been raised to. Seven in the morning and eight at night had become hours for her vigil. That gave her a good two hours after supper to enjoy the porch with Jim. (235)

Tranquility acts as a natural laxative for Arvay; it routinizes and orders her day around her body's digestion. Making time for peace on the porch relaxes her body, enabling Arvay to accept the interior "goodness" of excrement. (As Grosz puts it, "Inside the body,... [feces] is the condition of the body's ability to regenerate itself" [91].) When Arvay is in repose, the interior rumblings of her body tell her that she can cleanly eliminate her waste, that her waste will leave her body all in good time.

And so the narrative continues with a hushed calm:

Arvay moved leisurely towards the door into the house. As she went, the perfume from the flowers surged around her. The moon was rising, and some mocking-birds in a tangerine tree began to trill sleepily. The whip-poor-will was still sending out his lonesome call. Arvay paused in the door and looked back on the softly lighted porch. It was to her the most beautiful and perfect scene in all the world. She was as near to complete happiness as she had ever been in her life. The porch told her that she belonged. Slowly she turned away and went on to the bath. (236-37)

If Arvay finally "belongs" because of her porch (an upper-class affiliation), then the significance of Arvay's heading for the bath reinforces a connection between the proper, upper-class body and its anxious difference from what does not belong, what must be abjected.

Kenny's call arrives at the same time Arvay is seated in the bathroom, interrupting the "beautiful and perfect scene" which might, finally, allow her to shit. The implied movement of Arvay's excrement from inside to outside increases narrative panic and urgency:

"Jim!" Arvay yelled through the closed door. "Didn't they say New Orleans? Do, My Maker! What's done happened to Kenny?" ... Arvay leaned back, but she did not relax. Kenny couldn't be too bad off if he was able to come to the phone.... There was really no need for Jim to call Arvay. She had heard him through the door and was both eager and anxious to get to the phone, but found herself too seriously involved.... Arvay desperately tried to make it, but the click of the receiver found her scrambling to a standing position with her clothes up around her waist. Jim waited in silence until she came out of the door and told her. (237)

While this section of the novel is crucial for understanding the way in which Arvay relates past and present, loss and control, it is also important to see how Hurston messes with traditional eugenic paradigms and tropes. For if Arvay represents the white body that must negotiate its "trash," then the bathroom scene involves a twist on this representation. The loss of Kenny, the "good" son, both interrupts and parallels the loss of Arvay's excrement. Yet throughout the novel, it is Earl who embodies the "social waste" of Arvay's white trash past. Arvay denies that Earl is a threat to anyone; Earl "leaves" Arvay not of his own will, but after having been hunted down and, finally, killed by the local townspeople for attempted rape. [20] Earl leaves Arvay in utter abjection, immersed in the swamp--murdered. Kenny, on the other hand, confidently leaves Arvay to pursue his dreams as a musician. On the toilet, Arvay struggles to relax and quickly finish up her business as Kenny breaks the news that he will not be returning home. The good child here makes a clean break from the mother, and Arvay's inability to accept the loss throws her into an abject state, unwilling to let another "one" go. Thus this critical chapter ends with Arvay retreating to her old bedroom, where she goes "forth to face the demon of waste and desert places and take him for her company" (239).

Hurston's Jo(K)e

Arvay's function as a corporeal center for the processing of inherited goodness and badness speaks to the problem of "race" as it intersects with science and purity. However, Hurston also presents interracial differences to question the "nature" of inherited properties, to subvert the assumed naturalness of the body as the referent for racial essence. Hurston pulls in and fades out the African American Kelsey family (Joe and Dessie) to hyperbolize Arvay's whiteness and to amplify the acquisition (rather than natural inheritance) of cultural traits as integral to racial identity.

The scene in which Arvay and Joe Kelsey muse over Kenny's musical abilities reinscribes Kenny as the socially productive white subject, but it also gestures toward a split between subject formation as culturally mutable and subject formation as naturally occurring, running in the blood and trapped within the body. When Joe and Arvay discuss Kenny, it is Joe who insists that Kenny inherits his musical abilities from Arvay. [21] Joe's prospect soothes Arvay, providing a link that she had not yet considered between Arvay and the good son. Yet the broader context in which Joe reassures Arvay that she is the natural source of Kenny's brilliance alerts the reader to the fact that Joe might be pandering to Arvay, and that the underlying message which Hurston wants to come through exists between the lines. Joe remarks:

"Anyhow, I done raised Kenny and trained him to make a good living. I done done my share."

Arvay felt the same painful twist that she had felt years ago about Joe and Kenny. Then she took hold of herself. It wasn't right to feel jealous that way. She saw now why she had been so set against the music. It gave Joe a hold over her boy that made her feel excluded.

"Between you and me, Miss Arvie, we sure pulled that boy through, didn't us?"

"You mean you did, Joe. You learnt Kenny all that your ownself. I don't know the first pick on a box."

"That's where you'se ever so wrong, Miss Arvay. 'Taint everybody that can learn music like that. Kenny took to it because he brought that talent in the world with him. He got that part from you. He just naturally worried and pestered me to death to teach him. .... What's bred in the bones'll be bound to come out in the flesh. Yeah, that boy come here full of music from you."

"I always thought about Kenny as taking after Jim," Arvay said as if she were talking to herself. Joe looked at Jim and gave a great guffaw. "Mister Jim? Why, Mister Jim couldn't even tote a tune if you put it in a basket for him. Looks, yeah, but that music part he takes right after you.

... Arvay sat quietly for a minute and her face lighted timidly. "Yeah, I guess, I hope, that Kenny did take his music after me."

"Couldn't be nobody else, Miss Arvay," Joe said positively. (250-51)

Joe detours from having "raised" Kenny himself, to having co-raised Kenny alongside of Arvay, to persuading Arvay that her role as biological mother far outweighs his own influence (as cultural father) on the boy. Does Joe's "positive" assertion that Kenny inherited his musical flair from Arvay have a joking quality to it? Is Joe K(elsey) messing with Arvay?

Just before the above exchange, Joe tells a "lie" to entertain Arvay and Jim. In this scene, Arvay prepares breakfast for Joe, Joe's son Jeff, and her husband Jim. As Joe crams his mouth full of eggs and ham, he spiritedly recites a tall tale about swapping his near-bankrupt store for" 'a dozen hogs'" with 'a Crack--I mean a white man from back in the woods' "(248). In Joe's story, the Cracker's hogs eat and eat but gain no weight, and so he trades these hogs for a widow's" 'white narrow-made chickens [that] didn't have no habit of setting'" to lay eggs. In the punchline to the story, Joe tells Arvay and Jim that his chickens, like his hogs, ate with a voracious appetite, but still weren't worth the trade, producing little if anything at all. Convinced that more feeding would finally make the chickens useful, Joe dryly states that he took them to a" 'nice green patch of grass out in the country'" (249) so often that" 'all [he] had to do was to go out in the yard and they would lay down and cross they legs, ma king it convenient for [him] to tie 'em up and carry 'em to where [he] done found something for 'em'" (250). Joe's "lie" arouses a gale of laughter from Jim, who understands, perhaps, the implications of the Cracker, the intense consumption of hogs and scrawny white chickens, the unlucky black man, and the system of exchange. It is significant that Joe's joke directly precedes his "serious" exchange with Arvay about Kenny. The juxtaposition of these two scenes suggests that Hurston has inserted a black voice into the white trash narrative in order to critique its obsession with racially inherited traits. Joe jokes about the Cracker in his tale in order to call attention to the way in which property can be exchanged, that properties themselves (like the hungry hogs or lazy chickens or even musical ability) are not owned by black or white, but are swapped and traded. [22]

Waste Mat(t)ers

Although Arvay is consoled by A Joe's valorization of her maternal influence over Kenny, she still sinks into depressions, which Hurston often-times structures as tedious and torpid. Arvay labors under the weight of how and why her children are or are not like her, and in these states of immobilizing grief and isolation, the narrative reinscribes its peculiar linking of waste, children, and the maternal body:

With Earl dead, Angeline married off and needing nothing, Kenny up there doing so well and not calling on her for a thing, Jim off from home so much with his boats, there was little for [Arvay's] serving hands to do. She felt like a dammed-up creek. Green scum was covering her over. (253)

Arvay's conceptualization of her body as unuseful in its non-reproductive role signals a narrative return to her white trash, non-productive beginnings. We are told that the comfort of Joe "dissipate[s]" (253) almost as soon as he and Jim leave the kitchen, that Arvay feels herself "lost in the edges of the wastes," that the hours which drag past her are "old, worn out, lifeless marks on time... like raw, bony, homeless dogs" (268). Hurston blocks this time as abject time--time which is, literally, wasted. Since Arvay no longer possesses a functioning maternal body, she retreats into an abject realm of disuse. Even if Arvay can agree with Joe, temporarily, that her function as a (biological) mother to Kenny validates her existence, her sense of herself as a useless, abandoned body stems from her sense of herself as a non-mother.

Hurston's narrative connections among mother, child, waste material, and dissolution anticipate crucial components of Kristeva's theory of abjection. For Kristeva, too, abjection entails the mother's body. And yet, unlike Hurston, in Kristeva it is the child's proper separation from the mother (rather than the mother's letting go of the child) which leads to other forms of self-differentiation: of body/waste product, me/not me, "I"/"you," self/other. Kristeva theorizes that the "evocation of the maternal body and childbirth induces the image of birth as a violent act of expulsion through which the nascent body tears itself away from the matter of maternal insides" and that this newborn child "gives birth to himself by fantasizing his own bowels as the precious fetus of which he is to be delivered; and yet it is an abject fetus, for even if he calls them his own he has no other idea of the bowels other than one of abomination, which links him to the abject, to that non-introjected mother who is incorporated a s devouring, and intolerable" (101-02). [23] Here, the (male) child secures a total identity and total body by imagining that "his" body knows its own limits in the metaphor of "self-birth," by imagining that "his" waste products are "abject fetuses" which correlate with his difference from the mother: "I" am to "mother" as my waste products are to me.

In Seraph, however, it is less the problem of the (male) child's psyche with which the reader is concerned, but rather that of Arvay, the mother. Arvay's wallowing in wasted time and space occurs most strongly after her children are gone. Rather than pursuing the difficulties of Earl's, Kenny's, or Angeline's Oedipal anxieties, Hurston details the excremental depths into which the mother falls. Since Arvay herself vacillates between a belief in natural eugenic determinism and personal sexual shame, the reader has a strong sense of Arvay's guilt. Even if rational thought tells us that Arvay is not guilty of or for anything, her body is so wracked and marked by guilt that it makes it difficult for the reader to resist.

The figure of the empty White Trash Mother (through whom all negative traits take flesh) surfaces in eugenic field reports, and perhaps inspired Hurston's desire to provide depth to this flat, inert figure. Hurston carefully crafts Arvay's character by making use of and resignifying traditional psychoanalytic paradigms in order to provide a complicated interiority for the shells of "bad" white trash mothers reported in eugenic studies. Elizabeth S. Kite's study of "Two Brothers" (1912) represents "the first family study fully to realize the potential of the bad-mother theme" (74-75). Kite presents the exemplary case of two half-brothers "having had the same father but different mothers" (76; emphasis added):

One of them... was a man respected by all who knew him, intelligent, well married, with children who in themselves or in their descendants would cast nothing but honor upon the family name. The other, feeble-minded and morally repulsive, lived on a mountam-side in a hut built of rock fragments. . . . For a quarter of a century this hut existed as a hot bed of vice, the resort of the debauched youth of the neighborhood, and from its walls has come a race of degenerates. (76)

While "the mother" is central to the production of difference in each son, the narrative (as is typical with eugenic reports in general) raises her as a figure only to place blame, to expose her as a carrier of bad traits. Difference between mothers changes everything, both producing and implying a host of binary oppositions (good son/bad son, intelligent/feeble-minded, well-married/morally repulsive, honor/dishonor, homestead/hotbed of vice, culture/nature). Kite's ethnography tells us that "reason will at once decide that [these] difference[s] must be found in the women who became mothers of the respective lines, and in the subtle subjective forces that brought about and accompanied each mating" (78; emphasis added). Interesting that we find, in this study, a good son-bad son split, much like in Seraph. Kite's readiness to chalk up the qualities of each son "at once" to the good or bad mother seems too easy, especially in light of Seraph's Arvay, whose body produces both "good" (Kenny) and "bad" (Earl) sons . Yet the problem of a mother's defective blood becomes even more complicated in Seraph once Arvay is called home to visit her own mother, Maria. If Hurston's reader does assume that "bad blood" runs through the maternal line of the family, Arvay's final interaction with her mother problematizes this assumption in a powerful reconfiguration of blood, mothers, home, waste, and identity.

The reader comes to find that, although Arvay returns to Sawley, she does not do so on her own. Rather, Arvay receives a telegram from 'Raine: "MAMA SICK IN THE BED." The message is mysteriously incomplete, and Arvay puzzles over its meaning. "It didn't say how long Maria had been ailing, nor from what. It didn't say come or nothing. Not even whether Maria was in need of more money" (271). Even though Arvay attributes her decision to go back home to the "mysterious ways" of God, the intensity of "MAMA" (Maria) as a symbolic force in the novel suggests that it is not "God" who calls Arvay home, but rather Arvay's desire to reconnect with her (abject) mother.

During Arvay's preparations for the trip, she mentally transforms her destitute beginnings into a glimmering fantasy:

The corroding poverty of her childhood became a glowing virtue, and a state to be desired.... Peace, contentment and virtue hung like a rainbow over the turpentine shacks and shanties.... Even Lorraine and her family stood glorified in this distant light. Arvay felt eager to get back in the atmosphere of her humble beginnings.... She was going home! Home to the good old times and simple, honest things, where greed after money and power had no place. (272)

Here, Arvay displaces abjection away from Sawley, romanticizing the town's economic disenfranchisement as a wholesome slice of American life, one with which she can proudly and uniquely identify: "Arvay tossed her head defiantly and rhymed out that she was a Cracker bred and a Cracker born, and when she was dead there'd be a Cracker gone" (272). In Arvay's fantasy, home is not only a place of easy-going generosity (which it never was, for Arvay), but also a place where one is "bred" before one is "born." As usual, Arvay's opinions about breeding and birth are erratic; she slides from one confident position to another without ever seeming to realize her contradictions. Is she who she is by virtue of birth? Breeding? A combination of the two? Which comes first? Has she changed? Can she change? All of these questions emerge for a final time after Arvay closely watches her mother's body pass over into death.

Just as Kristeva theorizes the body's waste products, she also theorizes the body as the ultimate waste product: the corpse. The psychological significance of the corpse provides a context for unpacking the representational work of Arvay's mother:

A decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection. . . . the corpse represents fundamental pollution. A body without soul, a non-body, disquieting matter . . . it must not be displayed but immediately buried so as not to pollute the divine earth. Connected nevertheless with excrement and impure on that account, the corpse is to an even greater degree that by means of which the notion of impurity slips into that of abomination and/or prohibition. In other words, if the corpse is waste, transitional matter, mixture, it is above all the opposite of the spiritual, of the symbolic, and of divine law. (109)

The threat posed by the corpse produces an abjection which reminds the (live) subject of her or his always unstable border position as a possible corpse, a future corpse-to-be, a body which is at all times near-to-death.

As Arvay beholds her dying mother, she risks the pollution of the corpse or an association with death itself: a non-being with the face of the mother.

Maria sank back down in the depths of her pillows with a look of utter rapture on her sunken face. Her toothless mouth had caved inso deeply that the nose and chin seemed to meet. Arvay saw the thin lips work as if they tasted some delicious morsel as Maria closed her old eyes. . . . the thin bony old hand clung to hers and held her back. Arvay sensed that it was some satisfaction at her presence that Maria was trying to express. The muttering and gurgling went on for some minutes, then Maria belched, worked her lips for a moment and was very quiet. Stroking the old hand for a while, Arvay finally looked down and began to look for signs. (281)

The transition of Maria from speaking subject (mother) to the spoken subject (the mother's corpse) signifies a simultaneous collapse of Arvay's "white trash" identity. The representation of Maria as the "toothless mouth [that] had caved inso deeply that the nose and chin seemed to meet" suggests not only a caving in of the mother's body but also, by association and proximity, a caving in of Arvay's identity, an implosion of the White Trash Mother within. The imploding body represents the movement of the abject (which "threatens us [all] from the outside" [Kristeva 41]) from that which is marginal to that which is central. Arvay's desire to keep this threat at bay, to dam up her inherited abjection, her innate, inborn, class-affiliated, in-the-genes trashiness finally fails. In a maternal metonymy, abjection moves from the margins of Arvay's white identity (what she "used to be") toward its center or "home," a home represented by both the mother's corpse and the property in which it is housed.

Inherited "Properties"

The final section of the novel considers, once again, the matter of properties--inherited and acquired. Just as Hurston inserts the Joe Kelsey scene earlier in the novel to call attention to the importance of swapping and trading "properties," Hurston returns to the trope of "property" at the end of the novel to hyperbolize the meaning of inheritance and acquisition. The death of Maria is concomitant with Arvay's taking the Henson home, or property, as her own. From her deathbed, Maria tells Arvay about the "paper fixing things so [she] could come into this place all by [he ]rself without no trouble of any kind" (278). It is Maria's intention to pass her property on to Arvay, to make Arvay a full owner of the White Trash Mother's home. This intention is met with resistance by Arvay who, after watching her mother's body collapse in the death scene, seems confused about what such an inheritance should mean.

After the removal of Maria's corpse by way of a fancy funeral, Arvay shuffles through several theories of how class differences affect poor whites. First, Arvay posits that "not having, and never having things made people do things and act ways that they wouldn't if they ever had anything they wanted" (299). Yet this changes soon after Maria's funeral, when Arvay returns to the Henson property itself. Arvay is horrified to find the house her mother left to her empty, and trash strewn about the yard (thanks to 'Raine and Carl Middleton). It is then that she re-formulates her theory, telling her neighbor:

"It's just like my husband says. He says folks makes a bad mistake when they call places slums. He says folks are the slums instead of the places they live in. Places don't get nasty and dirty and low-down unlessen some folks make 'em like that. Place some folks in what is called slums and they'll soon make things look like a mansion. Place a slum in a mansion and he'll soon have it looking just as bad as he do. It ain't right to blame it on the place. Leave land alone by itself, and it'll grow up into trees and flowers. It sure don't grow up into slouchy people." (304-05)

The switch from what Arvay thinks to a discourse of "what Jim says" clues the reader into the class and gender conflict at work in Arvay. Arvay's status as a poor rural woman (surviving in an increasingly bourgeois America) demands that she reject a "social theory" that grounds itself in political and economic determination. In other words, Arvay, once again, changes her mind: Rather than stay with a theory that sees economic conditions as producing class subjects, Arvay decides that "slum"-like people produce the poverty in which they live. At this point in the novel, her psychological and political interests necessitate a turn from her "white trash" history. Yet the novel constructs this change by gendering it male--"my husband says"-- rather than re-figuring Arvay as the "author" of this articulation. So is Arvay distancing herself from the position by attributing this stance to Jim? Does she believe what she is saying, or merely repeating what Jim says to enable her own rejection of home?24

Arvay's incineration of the Henson property reflects the passion with which Arvay takes hold of this emerging paradigm. The house takes on abject properties after Arvay's "my husband says" speech:

In a traditional Southern Gothic convention, narrative references to "scum," "fumes and vapors,"" disease," "twisted limbs," and "bad breath" describe the way in which the house has come to embody the nastiness and deformity of Arvay's experience of embodiment. Arvay moves "from room to room...gathering up and piling together the trash and rags that had been left behind. There was plenty everywhere" (307; emphasis added). As the house burns, Arvay seats herself under the mulberry tree (the place in which Jim, after his rape of Arvay, "picked a dead leaf and bits of trash out of the back of [Arvay's] head" [53]), and while

It was an evil, ill-deformed monstropolous accumulation of time and scum. It had soaked in so much of doing-without, of soul-starvation, of brutish vacancy of aim, of absent dreams, envy of trifles, ambitions for littleness, smothered cries and trampled love, that it was a sanctuary of tiny and sanctioned vice....its fumes and vapors had stuck to her sufficiently to scar Jim and bruise her children. There was no getting away from it....The house had caught a distemper from the people who had lived in it, and had then diseased up people. It caught people and twisted the limbs of their minds. What was in its craw gave off bad breath. (306)

looking at the conflagration, exultation swept over her followed by a peaceful calm. It was the first time that she was conscious of feeling that way....she picked herself over inside and recognized why she felt as she did now. She was no longer divided in her mind. The tearing and ripping and useless rending was finished and done. She had made a peace and was in harmony with her life. (308-09)

Conflagration here works to conflate the word's double meaning, simultaneously signifying 'fire' and 'conflict,' to expose the ecstasy with which Arvay experiences its release. The "peaceful calm" returns the reader to the scene prior to Arvay's moment in the bathroom, in which "she was as near to complete happiness as she had ever been in her life" (236-37). Arvay's "tearing, ripping, and useless rending" terminates as she watches the fire. Again, this harkens back to Arvay's toiling in the bathroom, during which she found herself "too seriously involved" to get to the telephone. Arvay's involvement in "tearing, ripping, and useless rending" signifies both corporeal angst over excretion and childbirth as well as the expulsion of cultural and psychological elements from Arvay's life. [25] The property-burning scene effectively replaces identity-based implosion and death (Arvay's mother) with identity-based explosion and life (fire and bodily peace) and indicates the completion of Arvay's disposal of her "tras h." [26] With this completion the reader sees a "new," changed Arvay, whose worries about eugenic impurities have caught fire and turned to ash, leaving in its place a renewed sense of self, an empty lot, whose possibilities remain open.

Where the Sun Don't Shine

It seems, then, that Arvay has made it. She has torched her bad properties. She has left Sawley behind and taken on a new attitude. She is ready to love Jim. She has risen from the "demon of wastes" to become the luminescent "seraph" of the novel's title. Her whiteness is no longer besmirched by dirt or filth, but rather shines in spiritual communion with other, more brilliant whites. But even though we know that Arvay returns to Jim with a renewed sense of self, we also know that Arvay's sunny disposition stems (disappointingly?) from a newly found obsession with universal motherhood. In the closing section of the novel, Arvay joins Jim and his crew on their boat, and as it sails through rough waters, Arvay takes on the role of mother-to-all. No longer the white trash mother, preoccupied with class differences between her and her husband, the new Arvay feels that "her job [i]s mothering. What more could any woman want and need? ... Jim was hers and it was her privilege to serve him.... She was serving and m eant to serve" (351-52). What can this strange, un-Hurston-like ending mean in light of what we have learned from Hurston's intense examination of race and class, eugenics and abjection? For while the sun finally shines on Arvay, it only does so once she can re-establish herself as the good mother, the benevolent angel in the house. Certainly, this position does not advocate the kind of liberal feminism associated with Hurston. So, what's up?

My guess (and it is a guess, after all of the ambiguities and contradictions in the novel) is that, much like Joe's multi-layered joke in the novel's middle, Hurston constructs an ending which confounds the expectations of her readership. Remember that, earlier in the novel, Joe's joke brings an alternative voice to the thematics of natural heredity and psychological/corporeal angst. It loosens narrative tension and introduces a discourse of cultural acquisition. While Hurston's ending is not quite a "joke" (at least, not the easily identifiable joke that Joe makes), perhaps there is a level of facetiousness to it. After all, as I have argued, the novel is about waste and whiteness, an (at times) winking critique of white paranoias about personal and social purity. If Hurston ends the novel with a less than heroic gesture, perhaps she is pointing to something else about whiteness: that the incompletions and dissatisfactions of white (female) behavior are something with which racial Others might want to dis-i dentify. In the last sentence of the novel, Arvay "ma[kes] the sun welcome to come on in" (352). The story ends by letting the sun in where it has, up until this point, not shone (on Arvay). Is this an encoded gesture, troping off of the (anal) joking command "Stick it where the sun don't shine!"? If Hurston's goal was to shed light on folks and attitudes which normally remain in the dark, and to do so by embedding a plethora of excremental and anal signifiers, then by the novel's close, perhaps Hurston could not resist the opportunity to let the sun shine in on Arvay, the synechdochal (white) asshole. [27] Perhaps the point of letting the sun in, at the novel's end, is to show that the anguished transformation from low to high, from destitute to wealthy, from melancholic to affable can never fully complete itself, and that anyone who believes that this is so is, literally, making an ass of him- or herself.

Chuck Jackson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Rice University, where he is completing his dissertation "American Extremes: Violence, Impurity, the South, and the Nation."

Notes

(1.) For an overview of Seraph's critical reception, see St. Clair.

(2.) See the close readings and contextualizations in duCille; Plant; and Lowe.

(3.) For an excellent re-reading of the theoretical complexities of Hurston's non-conformity and her vision of "community," see Kawash.

(4.) Claudia Tate reminds scholars of the importance psychoanalysis had for Harlem Renaissance writers and reads Seraph in conjunction with Freud.

(5.) For a more comprehensive account of these charges, see Hemenway. Note especially the language of abjection that creeps into Hurston's devastated letters (321-22).

(6.) See Doyle for more on eugenics and literary representations of race and gender.

(7.) See Richard Dyer's White (1997), a full-length study which elaborates the connection between the aesthetics of cinematography and racial whiteness. See also hooks; Wray and Newitz. For a comprehensive treatment of the "southern poor white" as a stock character in white U.S. literature, see Cook.

(8.) For a fuller history of American eugenics, see especially Hailer; Hasian.

(9.) See Rafter's critical collection White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877-1919 (1988).

(10.) For a comprehensive list of human "traits" with which eugenic researchers had to be familiar, see Davenport. For a thorough historical treatment of the eugenics movement in the early-twentieth-century United States, see Pickens.

(11.) For a more complete list of "why" Hurston might deliberately have chosen to write about whites, see, again, Carby's "Introduction" to the novel (vii-xvi).

(12.) Hemenway's literary biography provides significant details on Hurston and her work with Franz Boas (63, 88). For Boas's relation to the politics of eugenics, see Haslan (60,110) and Pickens (esp. 173-74).

(13.) See Bordelon, Go for Hurston's folkloric texts. See also Bordelon, "New."

(14.) For another look at the way in which race and abjection intertwine in twentieth-century fiction, specifically of African American male authors, see Reid-Pharr.

(15.) See Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (1966), which Kristeva's text draws from, for a more complete understanding of how cultural contamination, taboo, and notions of cleanliness obtain anthropological importance.

(16.) Kristeva's work provides a starting point from which to think about the social and/or political function of abjection. More recently, Judith Butler argues that "the abject designates... those 'unlivable' and 'uninhabitable' zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject" (3). See most helpfully Butler's footnote, which reminds us that "abjection literally means to cast off, away, or out" (243). For Butler, abjection carries with it a sense of agency: "I want to propose that certain abject zones within sociality also deliver this [psychotic] threat, constituting zones of uninhabitability which a subject fantasizes as threatening its own integrity with the prospect of psychic dissolution ('I would rather die than do or be that!')" (243). For other articulations of abjection and its relation to texts, bodies, and cultures, see Thomas; Round Table; and Foster.

(17.) See Bakhtin. For a specific connection between the grotesque body and the female body, see Russo.

(18.) It should also be pointed out that this name is also possibly a pun, suggesting that the child is not going to be the royal patriarch's golden boy, but rather that he will exist in a more mediocre position in the family's "nobility" (as "earl" is to "marquis").

(19.) The anal metonymies at work in the entire new porch/constipation chapter are manifold. The description of the porch as that which is "stunning[ly] new" and difficult for Arvay to get used to combines with a language of relaxation. We are told that Arvay "never sat down unless Jim insisted, and then she did not lean back in the deep, comfortable chairs" but that "it got easier every time she tried it." Once Arvay takes to the porch, the narrator tells us that "it built Arvay up and made her feel more inside of things. It was kind of a throne room..." (234). Arvay's initial resistance to upper-class leisure and comfort takes on a kind of toilet-training narrative, in which her stubbornness finally dissolves once she discovers the ease of enjoyment.

(20.) The object of Earl's attack is Lucy Ann Corregio. While this essay does not treat the significance of the Portuguese American Corregio family in relation to the racial politics of the novel, it is interesting to note that Arvay struggles with an attempt to racialize this family. The arrival of the Corregio family on the Meserve property angers Arvay, because Jim had not told her of their "ethnic touch": "Jim had said that they were white folks, but the man turned out to be a Portuguese, and his name was Corregio. That made them foreigners, and no foreigners were ever quite white to Arvay. Real white people talked English and without any funny sounds to it" (120; emphasis added). The irony of this discourse of nationalist racial purity is, of course, that Arvay herself is ashamed of her "funny sounding" English, which is particularly evident when she and Jim travel to the University of Gainesville to see Kenny perform as drum-major for the band: Arvay, we are told, "felt awkward and out of place. Listen ing to the people around her, she became terribly conscious of her way of speech. She hated to open her mouth for fear of making a balk, and putting her children to shame" (209-10). Still, later in the novel, Arvay returns to this "not quite" theory of whiteness: "Felicia [Corregio] and her mother were nothing but heathen idolaters, and not to be treated white. Arvay proceeded to set up images of them among the African savages and heathen Chinee. They were not fellow-humans, they were nothing of the kind" (242).

(21.) Arvay's otherness within the Sawley community materializes so that she is both unlike other whites and, to a degree, more like blacks. Throughout Seraph, music is associated with African American culture--Kenny's apprenticeship under Joe Kelsey assures us of this. Arvay's "great interest and ... quick ability" (9) to master the organ sets her apart from the rest of the white community in Sawley, and marks her as more like blacks than whites. More to the point, Arvay's religious fervor at the novel's beginning is labeled as "excessive," and the narrator tells us that "excessive ceremonies were things that Negroes went in for. White folks just didn't go on like that" (4). The point here is not to read Arvay as a substitute black character, but rather to shed light on the way in which Arvay's own behavior does not exist in an isolated, pure-white space which has been passed down from generation to generation, but rather that there exists more cultural overlap than she might suspect. If Arvay is like black s, it is not simply that she was born that way, but that there is a strong cultural connection which allows for it.

(22.) More can be said about the term Cracker in Joe's joke. The disruption of Joe's speech, the replacement of Cracker with "a white man from back in the woods," signifies the political weight of the term. The fact that Joe cannot fully articulate the epithet signifies a quasi-danger in its usage. Joe obviously knows that Cracker cannot be spoken in front of Jim and Arvay, yet his readiness to use the term shows that it would not be the first time he has referred to the Meserves (or other poor whites) as "Crackers." If the term Cracker implies both white supremacist and white trash, then perhaps this struck Hurston as comic: If Arvay, the Hensons, Earl, and even Jim are "Crackers" to Joe Kelsey, are they racist rednecks or white morons? For a full history of the term, see Otto.

(23.) In light of more political feminist criticism, Kristeva's theory of the maternal seems dated and, perhaps, damaging to contemporary discourses about women's bodies. Yet I invoke Kristeva here (and throughout this essay) to show how Hurston' writing makes use of a similar poetics of the "horrific" Mother--a poetics Kristeva finds in the work of Freud, in modernist writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and in Biblical texts such as Leviticus and portions of the New Testament. Hurston's writing of the white maternal body anticipates Kristeva, only Hurston's connection between the mother and abjection is more deeply concerned with racial and class politics.

(24.) Arvay's "my husband says" speech uncannily echoes the following passage from Henry Herbert Goddard's largely popular 1912 The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness: "A study of [bad heredity] will help to account for the conviction we have that no amount of work in the slums or removing the slums from our cities will ever be successful until we take care of those who make the slums what they are .... If all of the slum districts of our cities were removed tomorrow and model tenements built in their places, we would still have slums in a week's time, because we have these mentally defective people who can never be taught to live otherwise than as they have been living" (70-71). Arvay's ideas about slums and mansions regurgitates this eugenic theory of poverty. The close connection between Goddard's study and Arvay's speech once again shows the way in which eugenic family studies overlap with Hurston's story.

(25.) This is not to say that the metaphor of bodily expulsion is over with for Arvay, but that the abject horror of letting things go has settled into a kind of easy contentment. Rather than thinking of motherhood as an excremental or excrementalizing process, Arvay can, instead, think of motherhood as a process through which she comes to know the world and make sense of its difficult binaries. The chapter in which Arvay ponders the "many mysteries" "buried and hidden in human flesh" attests to this resolution (350).

(26.) I choose to focus on the language of excorporation here, but it is also important to think about the language of "picking over" in the same passage. When Jim rapes Arvay under the mulberry tree at the beginning of the novel, the act sharpens the focus of class and gender power relations. To requote, Jim "smiled as he picked a dead leaf and bits of trash out of the back of her head" (53). Throughout the novel, Arvay meditates in order to "pick herself over inside" (35). However at this point in the text, after the rape, we see that it is Jim who picks trash off of Arvay's body, thus signifying his rape as a violent imposition of class values and patriarchal dominance, implicitly accompanied and explained by the logic of purification. That Arvay sits under the mulberry tree to watch the conflagration and to "pick herself over inside" possibly demonstrates that, while she can burn the site of her economic and familial oppression, Arvay is still bound to the site of her gender oppression. The novel eventua lly finds Arvay back together with Jim, and finally happy. Arvay's romantic return to Jim closes and resolves the romance plot, problematically smoothing over the gap or rupture that is signified by Arvay's rape. For a more complex reading of rape in Seraph, see DuCille; Plant; and Lowe.

(27.) While the constipation/laxative scene after the porch certainly thrusts anality at the reader, it is not the only scene in which anality (and, by implication, the asshole) figures prominently. Arvay and Jim's first marital argument takes place in bed, as Arvay reads the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Jim insists that Cain had "'no sense of humor' "and that he "'was so chuckle-headed that he couldn't even take a joke'" (66). Much to Arvay's horror, Jim proceeds to theorize that Cain "'never would have got into all that trouble if he could have seen a joke. He never would have up and scorched a stinking, rotten cabbage under God's nose for no sacrifice. Common sense ought to have told him God wouldn't stand for him stinking up Heaven and all like that. How come he couldn't have made God a nice cool salad and took it to Him?' "(66). Arvay is shocked to hear Jim "mock" the Bible in such a way, and refuses to sleep with him that night. However, the subtext here about jokes and stinking cabbages under God's nose implies an integration of anality in an otherwise pristine text; the fact that Jim and Arvay have a "battle which raged and roiled" suggests that passion (in some form) has erupted from the discussion of anal metonymies in bed. More clearly, at the novel's close, Arvay (finally) makes an anal joke of her own. When Carl Middleton pays an uninvited visit to Arvay in her hotel, he complains to her about injuries which took place on the Henson property (in an attempt to weasel some money out of her). Arvay insists that Carl tell her where he is hurt on his body, and Carl replies, " 'I been trying to treat you like a lady. Where I'm hurt at ain't to be exposed in public.... it's my behind, and could be inside injuries besides for all I know.... I guess now you want me to show it to you.' "Arvay quips, "'Nope .... My Mama always told me not to look on backlands.... I'm in no way responsible, but if you're in as bad a fix as you say, I can tell you something mighty good for a case like that. Get hold of some m utton tallow, then melt it together with some teppentime and grease yourself good back there.'" Arvay publicly humiliates Carl in the hotel, but seems unaware that she is making a joke, "'But I ain't joking. It really is mighty healing. Takes the soreness right out. I keep it on hand all the time'" (292). The point here is that Arvay is able to articulate her relation to her own behind--how to care for it when it is sore, how to grease it when it needs lubrication--so that, while Hurston does not need to come out and say "asshole" (just as Arvay does not need to see Carl's in order to know whether it is healthy or injured), it is clear to the reader that Arvay is an expert at this orifice's care.

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