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

by Claudia Tate

Why did African-American women novelists use idealized stories of bourgeois courtship and marriage to mount arguments on social reform during the last decade of the nineteenth century, during a time when resurgent racism conditioned the lives of all black Americans? Such stories now seem like apolitical fantasies to contemporary readers. This is the question at the center of Tate's examination of the novels of Pauline Hopkins, Emma Kelley, Amelia Johnson, Katherine Tillman, and Frances Harper. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire is more than a literary study; it is also a social and intellectual history--a cultural critique of a period that historian Rayford W. Logan called "the Dark Ages of recent American history." Against a rich contextual framework, extending from abolitionist protest to the Black Aesthetic, Tate argues that the idealized marriage plot in these novels does not merely depict the heroine's happiness and economic prosperity. More importantly, that plot
encodes a resonant cultural narrative--a domestic allegory--about the political ambitions of an emancipated people. Once this domestic allegory of political desire is unmasked in these novels, it can be seen as a significant discourse of the post-Reconstruction era for representing African-Americans' collective dreams about freedom and for reconstructing those contested dreams into consummations of civil liberty.

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Claudia Tate (December 14, 1947 – July 29, 2002) was a noted literary critic and professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is credited with moving African-American literary criticism into the realm of the psychological.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was amazing. By pointing out that literature is reflective of the times the author puts the writings of African-American women in context. Using different writers and placing them in their time periods she addresses their reaction to their times. The abuses of slavery and reactions to it are in the antebellum writings. Hope for a stable family life in the post-bellum and reconstruction eras are in the writers of those periods because slaves were not allowed to have legal marriages and stable domestic lives. The writers had to be in tune with Victorian ideals using them as goals for a newly freed population. Thus they did not challenge the patriarchy. African-American were to be patriarchs and the women were to be like the women of the predominant culture. At the turn of the century Anna Cooper wrote decidedly in favor of equal opportunity for women. As the Jim Crow era started the writing changed and many writers stopped writing as their hopes were essentially dashed. The book ends with Angelina Weld Grimke's writings.
In providing context to the writings Tate provides the history that gives meaning to the writings. She shows that women viewed their freedom different than males.

[sdw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tate examines domestic fiction produced by Black US women writers in the 1890s. She politicizes the depictions of the domestic as ideals that represented the political desires of the works’ first readers. She reconstructs the political milieu to demonstrate the plausibility of her reading of the desires of the works’ first readers. While her political context is well-written, she also excels in her close readings of the texts. One particularly enjoyable chapter compared the gendered relationship between marriage and freedom in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Richard Wright’s Black Boy . Using these more contemporary texts as lenses, Tate explains why the earlier writings she examines appear as apolitical to the contemporary reader, and why such a reading of the texts as apolitical is itself ahistorical. Her argument, that black Americans viewed marriage in the post-reconstruction period as akin to voting as a political right granted by citizenship and the end of slavery, is particularly effective in politicizing the unrealistic romantic plots she analyzes. I also very much enjoyed the comparative reading of Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig. These two chapters provided the antecedents and progeny of the ideas, ideals, and desires expressed in 1890s novels central to her argument.

The heart of Tate’s study focuses on 11 domestic fiction novels written by black women in the post-reconstruction period. She succeeds at documenting the ways in which the novels used similar methods of politicizing the tropes of sentimental literature to forge differing ideological positions. Moreover she successfully demonstrates the shift over time in the domestic representations she considers.

It is often hard to enjoy literary criticism of texts which one has not yet read. Yet Tate succeeded in bringing such texts alive. I find myself with a new list of literature I would like to read starting with Angelina Weld Grimke’s play Rachel.

I read Claudia Tate’s book immediately after Amy Kaplan’s Anarchy of Empire. Both books were suggested as useful models in engaging the politics of domestic representations in US fiction. Tate’s book was most successful in reminding me of the importance of linking ideas lifted from models to the time of their production. While I could muster the textual evidence to apply some of her ideas directly to the texts I am most concerned with these days, to do so would be historically inconsistent. Yet Tate’s point that whether marriage is considered to limit or further the ability of the individual to contribute to social justice seems applicable even to a different group and different circumstances. How is citizenship imagined in a certain moment? What are the responsibilities and duties of a citizen? How are the responsibilities, duties, and outcome of marriage related to those responsibilities, and duties of citizenship? What kind of citizenship is marriage modeling?

Although I appreciated Tate’s focus on first readership, this is the least applicable to my project. If anything, it highlighted to me how little audience matters to the discursive traditions I am documenting. Indeed, several of the works I engage were never published during their day.

Although I found Tate’s work thoroughly engaging, if you don’t care must for literary criticism, you may not be as intrigued.