Violence and Selfhood in the BlackFemale Protagonists of Larsen, Butler and Morrison
The history of black American fiction is bound up with the history of trauma inflicted upon black people over the centuries. Dating back to the slave narratives of pre- and post-abolition America, through the works of the Harlem Renaissance and of mid-twentieth century writers and activists, to the emergence of neo-slave narratives towards the end of the century, these texts have depicted the original and ongoing effects of systemic racism. Naomi Morgenstern describes this lasting legacy of slavery as ‘the timeless time of trauma’ (11). This violent history of suppression is often forgotten or ignored, particularly by white society, either for the sake of self-preservation (Parham 1316-1317) or for self-benefit, since the wealth and prosperity of the nation is built on the back of slavery. Furthermore, an aspect of this history which is neglected even further is its treatment of black women, who must endure the double trauma of ‘the inextricability of racism and sexism’ (Wall 98). Indeed, the experiences of black women throughout history and in the present day are often overlooked, a fact which is mirrored by the typical preclusion of black female writers from literary and academic canons (hooks 2).
Black womanhood is assailed by some of the worst manifestations of this timeless trauma, since those represented by its intersections are attacked from all sides by misogynistic objectification and racist dehumanisation. As such, black women specifically are often reduced to being merely bodies in society (Vint 242) and consequently are denied selfhood. With this imposed lack of selfhood come stereotypes similarly projected onto black women: the alien Other (Shinn Richard 119), the exotic, sensual temptress (Wall 104), the ‘embodiment of evil’ (Nehl 64), and the failed mother (Morgenstern 8) to name a few. In response to these stereotypes, even more preconceived notions of black womanhood have been imposed, such as ‘the ornamental, acquiescent role of “lady”’ (Wall 99). Trapped between these extremes of false representation, the lived experiences of black women are marginalised, replaced by presupposed beliefs about them. It is for this reason that many black female writers, such as Nella Larsen, Octavia E. Butler and Toni Morrison, sought to regain their voice by documenting this collective trauma through the focalised experiences of their protagonists. Thus, this essay will analyse Larsen’s Quicksand, Butler’s Kindred and Morrison’s A Mercy to explore the ways in which the personal experiences of their protagonists – Helga, Dana and Florens respectively – are able to convey the multiple forms of collective trauma imposed upon black women. To do this, the essay will focus first on the protagonists as individuals, how external sources threaten this individuality and how this affects selfhood, then on how the connections between this emotional violence and the themes of physical and sexual violence within the texts, before identifying the ways in which the tools of oppression are used by the protagonists to reclaim selfhood from systems that deny their existence.
The narratives of these texts emphasise both the individuality and the ways in which this is threatened by external sources. In Quicksand, Helga’s sense of style, aesthetic and demeanour set her apart from those around her. Wherever she finds herself, be it Naxos, Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen or Alabama, she remains ‘purposely aloof, and a little contemptuous’ (60) of the community she finds herself surrounded by, while simultaneously feeling ‘an uncontrollable desire to mingle with the crowd’ (30). This disjunction, feeling both apart from and a part of the collective, is linked by critics to her biracial status (Wall 98) as well as her prioritisation of material aestheticism over conformity to heteronormative kinship (Wagner 137). In Denmark, as the only black woman there, her individuality is transformed into otherness and she is forced to literally embody everything that a black woman is believed to be. This culminates in the ekphrasis of Olsen’s portrait of her, which for Helga is a betrayal, since her kinship with material possessions and art portrays only ‘a disgusting, sensual creature with her features’ (89), a perverse artistic interpretation of the stereotype under which she has been subsumed.
In Kindred, meanwhile, Dana is transplanted through both space and time from her home in 1976 to antebellum Maryland. As such, she too is forced to be the sole representative of her sense of black womanhood in a society that denies this truth. Moreover, Butler’s use of time travel here means that Dana experiences the past as the present, turning the fictionalised version of slavery she has ‘seen… on television and in the movies’ into a visceral reality. Indeed, as Sherryl Vint writes, Butler’s blurring of time periods here suggests that ‘it is only through bodily experience that Dana can come truly to know slavery’ (244), particularly since her orphanhood means that her connection to this violent part of her personal history is severed from her daily reality (Behrent 803). Thus, Dana too stands apart from the slaves on Tom Weylin’s plantation; or, at least, she tries to. It is vital for Dana’s sense of self that she distinguishes between herself and the other female slaves, since identification with them reduces her status to that of ‘property… a horse or a sack of wheat’ (Butler 275). Despite this need, Dana is often conflated with other female slaves, namely Sarah when she cooks dinner for the Weylins (174) and Alice, whose similarity to Dana leads Rufus to view them as ‘one woman. Two halves of a whole’. Thus, like Helga, her individuality is firmly established while simultaneous attempts to undermine it are made by the people around her, splitting her view of herself in two and giving her ‘a doubled perspective of the past’ (Vint 248-9).
Morrison’s presentation of individuality in A Mercy is more complex. The book features multiple narrators, each with distinct narrative voices characterised by perspective, tone and language. Florens, a sixteen-year-old slave girl, features most prominently in the novel and demonstrates the process of what Naomi Morgenstern describes as ‘traumatically inflected racial subject formation’ (19), a recurring theme in Morrison’s works. Through her first-person narration, the reader discovers a number of traumatic events that have occurred in her life, beginning with her supposed abandonment by her mother, through her first encounter of anti-black racism and culminating in the rejection by her lover and her subsequent violent outburst. Florens, like Dana and Helga, is made to feel like ‘a thing apart’ (Morrison 109) by those around her. It is in response to this imposed alienation that ‘Florens must come to terms with her own individuality’ which she does when she ‘write[s] herself into existence’ by carving her story into her recently deceased master’s house (Anderson 132). Thus, Florens’s story centres around her self-invention, at first through her dependence on others (her mother and the blacksmith), and finally through coming to terms with her own actions. Her self-narration is a way to ‘embrace her blackness and her history’ (Nehl 74) in a world where she is surrounded by those who see her as evil.
The fact that these protagonists are emphasised as individuals in their respective stories, then, is emphasised in these texts. However, Helga, Dana and Florens are all threatened by the institutions and the people that surround them and impose different versions of black womanhood onto them. As a result, their senses of self are split due to the internalisation of these impositions: Helga’s sexual desire for Robert Anderson is evident to the reader, yet for most of the book it is sidestepped to avoid becoming what she sees in Olsen’s portrait; Dana, at times, replaces Sarah and Alice in the narrative, and is forced to participate bodily in both the house and field work, oftentimes complicit in the horrors of systemic slavery; and Florens, having been made to feel like a ‘clawing feathery thing’ (110) by the white Puritans when they inspected her, identifies with this by describing herself as having ‘feathers’ and ‘claws’ in her final act of violence (135). Thus, this internalisation of external racial stereotypes, reminiscent of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of ‘double consciousness’ (8), and the fragmentation of self as consequence is seen as a form of trauma which the three individuals share.
As well as this trauma of internalisation, these texts portray an external kind in the form of physical violence. In many ways, violence is the epitome of the idea of individual experience representing collective trauma. Sherryl Vint writes extensively on the theme of violence in black American fiction, tracing it back to slave narratives of the nineteenth century, since their aim of depicting the humanity of black slaves to white audiences required a ‘demonstration of bodily suffering’ (244). The aim of neo-slave narratives, conversely, is to indicate that the legacy of slavery is ongoing trauma that has not been allowed to heal (242), which Vint links to Butler’s ‘far more explicit’ depictions of violence in Kindred (249). Indeed, violence is central to the plot of Kindred: the reader watches as Dana goes from seeing the violence of slavery on-screen, to seeing it in person when Alice’s father is whipped (33) to experiencing this violence first-hand, over and over in increasingly brutal ways. This depiction of violence is integral for several reasons. Firstly, it illustrates just how torturous the means of suppression on plantations known as ‘the pushing system’ really was (Behrent 807). Secondly, it physicalises the invisible trauma that racism and slavery have inscribed on the psyches of black people in the modern day, with the physical damage Dana endures to her body becoming a metaphor for the way in which ‘colonialism has inscribed its history on every African-American body and mind’ (Shinn Richard 120). And thirdly, when it is read on both a literal and a figurative level, the reader is able to see how this violence can suppress and destroy the selfhood of even someone as resilient as Dana, such that we too realise along with her ‘how easily people could be trained to accept slavery’ (Butler 108).
Though physical violence is most prominent in Kindred, its presence is palpable in A Mercy. Florens herself is often protected from the effects of violence, for example by her mother and Lina, but the other women she lives with, in particular Lina and Sorrow, have suffered great violence at the hands of men. Moreover, like Dana, violence is inscribed on the bodies of the slaves that Vaark sees at the beginning of the novel whose ‘scars’ are ‘like misplaced veins tracing their skin’ (19), thus conflating the body and the wounds inflicted on it, binding identity and trauma. Indeed, the reader is made to understand that violence is almost inevitable for women in this period due its pervasive nature. For Florens, violence is first experienced through words: when Lina describes her rape and beatings, Florens notes ‘something in her voice that pricks’ her, ‘something cutting’ (99); it is not until the blacksmith strikes her across the face that this ‘something’, this emotional violence, is physicalised in just the same way that it was for Lina. Like Dana, Florens encounters the violence of patriarchy through testimony before it is experienced first-hand; her individual experience of emotional and physical violence becomes a representation of the collective trauma which racism and misogyny impose upon black women.
Helga’s experiences of violence are more vaguely discussed in Quicksand. Many critics have noted Helga’s supposed repression of sexuality and desire (Wagner 141, Wall 101), and thus arguably this repression can also be extended to the violence she has encountered in her life. Though never explicitly stated or delved into, Helga’s childhood was a traumatic one, filled with ‘ugly scarifying quarrels’ between her white mother and her stepfather and ‘savage unkindness’ from her stepsiblings (23), descriptions of which seem to skirt around the issue of violence. Helga’s relation to violence seems more similar to Florens’s, in that emotional violence is often described in physical terms: memories are described as ‘hidden wounds’ (49), her first venture into the Y.W.C.A. leaves her with ‘a feeling that she had been slapped’ (33), and desire ‘burned in her flesh with uncontrollable violence’ (109). Other metaphorical depictions of violence come in the form of pathetic fallacy: following her meeting with Uncle Peter’s new wife, ‘the wind cut her like a knife’ (29), and moments before her religious conversion after she has been humiliated by Dr Anderson’s rejection, ‘rain and wind whipped cruelly about her’ (110). This emphasis on weather, the natural world’s effect on her, could be symbolic of the ways in which the social world also injures her. For Helga, violence is typically associated with feelings of shame and failure, which, again, is not truly physicalised for her until ‘that period of racking pain’ (130) she experiences in childbirth. Associating motherhood with shame and pain here is a representation of another failure for Helga: she has, against her better judgement, ‘contribute[d children] to the cause’ (103), and in doing so has conformed to heteronormative society (Wagner 149).
Physical violence is not the only threat posed to black women in these texts. The threat of sexual violence pervades these texts, as it does the lives of black women. Indeed, systematic rape and miscegenation have been used to suppress black women for centuries, with Megan Behrent linking ‘gendered violence’ to ‘the perpetuation of the institution of slavery’ (807). Vint notes the ‘centrality of rape to Dana’s narrative’ as a threat to her sense of selfhood (252) in two ways: she may herself become a victim of sexual assault, and must also be complicit in the rape of her ancestor Alice in order to ensure her own survival. Though the matter of sexual violence is not broached in Quicksand, Helga is all too aware of the desire of the men around her which she feels ‘like the flick of a whip’ (129); this use of imagery associated with slavery to describe marital relations is indicative of Helga’s stance on the institution of marriage and the consummation implicit within it. Rape is extremely prevalent in A Mercy, where most of the female characters – Lina, Sorrow and Florens’s mother most notably – have been raped, oftentimes bearing children as a result. The connections formed between rape, motherhood and genealogy here are also inherent traumas which bleed into the present day (Shinn Richard 121). Thus, rape is a constant threat to the protagonists of these texts, often treated as the elephant in the room and an inevitability. It directly threatens their senses of selfhood, since it epitomises the idea of self being replaced by an abject body which thereby ‘installs the will or desire of the rapist in place of one’s own subjectivity’ (Vint 253). For Helga, Dana and Florens, it is the ultimate denial of their agency as black women.
This literal and figurative portrayal of physical and sexual violence is representative of both the physical and emotional tolls that racism and misogyny have taken, both on the specific individuals and on the wider black female community. However, violence, identified as the tool of the oppressor in these texts, is also reclaimed by these protagonists and used as a means of either unconscious or deliberate rebellion. Though there are several examples of violence throughout – Florens hurting Malaik, Dana protecting herself from white patrolmen, Helga ‘violently’ discarding her ‘school-teacher paraphernalia’ (4) and her many repressed urges towards violence – each character has one main instance of violent retaliation which is central to their self-construction. In Kindred, Dana kills Rufus when he tries to rape her, using a phallic knife to subvert the attempted sexual assault and assert her own power against him. In Quicksand, Helga, humiliated both by Robert’s sexualisation of her and his rejection of her own desire, slaps him ‘with all her might’ (108), an impulsive, externalised reaction to her own shame. And in A Mercy, Florens attacks her lover with a hammer after his dismissal of her triggers her trauma of abandonment.
These three acts of violence share many similarities: firstly, they are all against men; secondly, these men all desire their respective female assailant; and thirdly, the woman in each instance acts on instinct in response to a form of threat, making this violent resistance a form of self-preservation. Most notably, however, all the women are successful in their attempts: Rufus is killed, Anderson is stunned into silence, and the blacksmith’s fate is unknown and presumed dead. Thus, these acts of violence are shown to be effective means of rebellion and gain the same metaphorical meaning as the violence imposed upon them: their external violence is emblematic of their internal resistance, and as such the men they assault become stand-ins for the white cisheteropatriarchal system which oppresses them all. Helga, Dana and Florens are victims of trauma in a multitude of ways, but their authors also indicate the ways in which this trauma can be subverted and employed to fight back against the injustices of racism and misogyny.
In conclusion, many forms of trauma have been inflicted on black women throughout history, from the slave trade through to modern day. These traumas, understood as a collective, shared experience, are represented particularly through the individual experiences of Helga, Dana and Florens. The fundamental trauma behind these is the denial of selfhood which objectification and dehumanisation entail, replacing the identities of black women with stereotypes and imposed selves which appease the white male population’s needs. Through their depictions of physical, metaphorical and sexual violence, Nella Larsen, Octavia E. Butler and Toni Morrison use their narratives to illustrate the psychological impacts on their protagonists and by extension on the black female community generally. However, though these texts go to great lengths to show the ways in which society seeks to traumatise black women in order to suppress them, these protagonists subvert this trauma and retaliate to reclaim their own senses of selfhood and individuality. Indeed, this seems to parallel the lived experiences of the black female writers themselves, since their written explorations of individual and collective trauma at the hands of white cisheteropatriarchy are forms of retaliation in and of themselves.
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