AFTER DU BOIS
This study makes no claim to comprehensiveness. I have focused on citational and appropriative acts most likely—due to their elaborateness, insightfulness, or sheer unexpectedness—to challenge and deepen our understanding of Victorian literature and of African American literature and print culture as well as the relationship between the two; and I have highlighted the work done on and with Victorian literature by now-canonical figures in particular to show that these textual encounters are not a marginal phenomenon but on the contrary helped shape the African American literary tradition. However, given the size of the archive of African American literature and print culture, on the one hand, and the many possible forms of citation and appropriation (not all of which are readily apparent) on the other, there is every reason to believe that further research will reveal this history of engagement to be even richer and more revelatory than I have been able to show here.
Yet even a more fully fleshed-out account of the African Americanization of Victorian literature will, I suspect, continue to show this phenomenon as flourishing primarily in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century. As argued in the previous chapter, Victorian literature becomes less distinctive and less significant a presence in African American literature and print culture after the end of the Victorian era. This is not surprising, since both the prestige and popularity of most Victorian literature—and of Victorian literature as a category—diminished rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, thanks in good part to the rise of modernism; with the loss of its contemporaneity, Victorian literature came to seem not timeless but passé. Moreover, when twentieth-century African American writers looked abroad for cultures that seemed freer from racial prejudice or even the pressures of racialized identity than the U.S., their gaze shifted from Britain elsewhere. As Brent Hayes Edwards has shown, France in particular took on this role, while also becoming the privileged site of black internationalism, with Paris viewed as “a special space for black transnational interaction, exchange, and dialogue.”1 Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, notions of racial authenticity also reinforced this turn away from Victorian literature, not only for its whiteness but also for its association with gentility and middle-class values. As discussed in the introduction, these same attitudes have shaped the dominant critical reception of the Victorian presence in African American literature and print culture until quite recently.
Among the writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance itself, the one who does the most to extend this Victorian presence is Jessie Redmon Fauset, literary editor of The Crisis and a close associate of Du Bois. Fauset’s first novel, There Is Confusion (1924), takes its title and epigraph (“There is confusion worse than death, / Trouble on trouble; pain on pain”) from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters,” and allusions to this passage within the novel recall the use Du Bois made of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and In Memoriam in The Souls of Black Folk: “It is amazing into what confusion slavery threw American life,” remarks one character late in the novel.2 Like Du Bois, then, Fauset uses a Tennysonian phrase from a very different context to describe the institution of slavery. Fauset, though, also keeps the phrase’s original context in play: this comment comes in a conversation between American soldiers in Europe during World War I, and the novel’s attention to soldiers at war and soldiers returning home further motivates the use of “The Lotos-Eaters.”
More intriguingly, in There Is Confusion Fauset also alludes to a Victorian novel with which Charles Chesnutt is in dialogue in The House Behind the Cedars (as I argued in chapter 4)—as is Du Bois in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (as I have argued elsewhere): The Mill on the Floss.3 One of the plotlines in Fauset’s novel tracks the balked relationship between a young working-class woman and a young man from a more well-to-do, respectable family that disapproves of the match. This is of course a generic novelistic scenario (albeit not one that had been explored many times with African American characters at the time Fauset is writing) and as such does not automatically call to mind Eliot’s novel. By naming her characters Maggie and Philip, however, Fauset invites comparison of the relationship she depicts to that between Maggie Tulliver—she of the “brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter”—and Philip Wakem, the sensitive, artistic son of the lawyer who is Maggie’s father’s sworn enemy.4
Although Maggie Ellersley and Philip Marshall are black—and although Fauset herself will famously be criticized by Alain Locke as “mid-Victorian”5—Fauset seems less interested in African Americanizing this mid-Victorian novel than in updating it. That is, her novel’s general focus on the role of racial prejudice and loyalties in determining individual destinies notwithstanding, Fauset is less interested in exploring what difference this racial difference makes to the story she and Eliot both tell than in exploring what difference the difference in era makes. Maggie Tulliver ends her engagement to Philip Wakem with a scandalous trip down the river with another man, but she does not consummate that (or any) relationship; by contrast, Maggie Ellersley reacts to a cruel letter from Philip Marshall’s sister seeking to break off her engagement (“Philip Marshall cannot marry a hair-dresser!” [87]) by rushing into marriage with a violent gambler—a marriage, moreover, that quickly ends in divorce. Maggie Tulliver can find no way to escape the predicament created by her supposed sexual history; the divorced Maggie Ellersley leaves for France to work at a leave-center for Negro soldiers, where she finds contentment for the first time. Maggie Tulliver feels admiration and pity but not romantic love for Philip Wakem, who is disabled (he is hunchbacked); when Maggie Ellersley and Philip Marshall are by chance reunited in France, her love for him is only intensified by the fact that he has been wounded and gassed—“She did not want him ill, but she adored his weakness, it gave her her first chance . . . to pay back, instead of always taking” (263)—and the two marry, even though Philip is dying. None of these differences reflect the fact that Eliot’s characters are white and Fauset’s are black. Fauset’s relative formal conservatism notwithstanding, most of There Is Confusion—in particular, the plot of divorce and remarriage, Maggie Ellersley’s greater economic independence, and the role played by war in shaping the characters’ lives—reflects the fact that the novel was published in 1924 rather than 1860.
It is telling that Fauset did not take issue with Alain Locke’s scorn for the mid-Victorian, even as she angrily rejected this epithet’s applicability to herself. Indeed, in a story published the year before There Is Confusion, Fauset acknowledged the declining currency of one quintessential Victorian writer, even as she cites him: “He was living at this time in the last years of the nineties,” her narrator remarks of one character, “and so was given to much reading of Tennyson. Angélique made him think of the Miller’s daughter, who had ‘grown so dear, so dear.’”6 While Robert Browning’s “Two in the Campagna” serves as a touchstone in her second novel, Plum Bun (1929), Fauset’s references to Victorian literature in her later novels are often framed by similar periodizing and modernizing gestures—for example, the narrator of The Chinaberry Tree (1931) notes that “once the frequent quoting of the Rubáiyát marked a person as possessing a certain amount of literary perspicuity”—and such references are virtually absent from her last novel, Comedy: American Style (1933).7
By and large, Victorian literature has not attracted particular attention from African American novelists writing more recently than Fauset. We might take as emblematic of the relationship of post–Harlem Renaissance literature to Victorian literature that displayed by one of the most celebrated novels by an African American, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Although Invisible Man borrows its title from H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel The Invisible Man, Ellison seems entirely uninterested in establishing any kind of intertextual relationship to Wells’s work. On the rare occasion when Ellison does mention Victorian literature in his critical and autobiographical essays, he is careful to limit its influence on him as a writer: “Wuthering Heights had caused me an agony of unexpressible emotion, and the same was true of Jude the Obscure, but The Waste Land seized my mind.” Despite the fact that Ellison himself became a novelist and not a poet, he identifies the reading of this poem, rather than the earlier novels, as the turning point in his relationship to literature, “the real transition to writing.”8
Yet the overall trend represented by Ellison notwithstanding, Victorian literature and the history of African American engagement with that literature may still have a productive and provocative role to play in contemporary literature by African American writers, as suggested by two recent novels. Not coincidentally, I would argue, these novels court controversy, with both of them depicting and occupying fraught positions with regard to the African American literary tradition and African American identity more generally. The earlier of these novels, Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), tells the teasingly semi-autobiographical story of a novelist, Thelonious Ellison, who resists being defined as black and rejects the notion that his subject should be “the African American experience” or that his writing should be viewed “as an exercise in racial self-expression.”9 Yet as the voicing of this resistance indicates (and as the protagonist’s first and last names emphasize), the novel does not escape this frame of reference but rather takes the frustrated desire to escape it as its subject: thus, instead of his usual postmodernist pastiches, the narrator writes a parody of a ghetto novel that, taken straight, achieves critical and commercial success. This strand of the novel is free of references to Victorian literature. However, another narrative strand of Erasure tracks Ellison’s efforts to come to terms with the death of his parents, and a Victorian text makes a striking cameo at a key moment: reading through a box of his father’s private papers, which consist mainly of letters revealing that his father had had a wartime affair with a British nurse—an affair resulting in the birth of a daughter—the narrator comes across “A very small, leather-bound book”: “Silas Marner by George Eliot.” This is, he comments, “An odd book to find,” but he discovers “pressed in its pages . . . a small flower, pink and white.”10
Coming as it does in a scene of emotionally loaded narrative revelation, this intertextual gesture begs to be read as meaningful. And coming as it does in a novel intent on contesting narrow definitions of the sources and subjects of fiction by African Americans—“I didn’t write as an act of testimony or social indignation . . . and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling”11—the choice of this Victorian staple of the twentieth-century canon and school curriculum makes sense as a possible nod to and renewal of the history of African American engagement with Victorian literature: although this history is by no means one of uniform opposition to the writerly motives and sources Erasure disdains here, it does model the freedom of literary association and appropriation claimed by Everett.12 Ironically, however, the narrator reports that “The pages between which the little flower was pressed seemed to have no significance or bearing on anything,” and the reader (at least, this reader) can do no better at motivating Everett’s choice of this “curiously chosen novel,” except to point to this recalcitrance itself.13 In other words, efforts to relate the particularities of Eliot’s fable of “the Weaver of Raveloe” (to quote the book’s subtitle) to Erasure seem as forced and unconvincing as the narrator’s extrapolation from the handwriting in the letters that “that nurse had had small but strong hands with trimmed nails, a weaver’s hands perhaps.”14 Everett introduces Silas Marner into the novel, it would seem, precisely to stymie and mock conventional interpretive protocols.
Insofar as Erasure bears out its narrator’s contention that the Victorian text he encounters has “no significance or bearing on anything,” this novel might serve as a fitting endpoint to the narrative constructed in Reaping Something New: the tradition of engagement tracked here is resurrected, only to be decisively put to rest. As Everett himself knows full well, however, a gesture such as his does not end a tradition but instead sustains it (if only “under erasure”); as his narrator muses in another context, “maybe I have misunderstood my experiments all along, propping up, as if propping up is needed, the artistic traditions that I have pretended to challenge.”15 This tension between propping up and challenging the presence of Victorian literature in African American literature is even more pronounced in another, even more recent novel, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015). Strikingly, this novel not only includes several prominent references to Victorian literature but also depicts their African Americanization.
In fact, Beatty homes in on practices, authors, and even one key text highlighted in the present book with uncanny precision. In doing so, Beatty does not seek to turn back the clock; rather, he takes turning back the clock as his topic, to consider how much has and has not changed over time for African Americans, for better and for worse. Thus, in this ferocious send-up of African American pieties and stereotypes alike (the first sentence of which is, “This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything”16), the unnamed narrator humors his aging neighbor Hominy Jenkins (supposedly one of the Little Rascals) by treating him as a slave and attempts to restore a sense of identity and community to his hometown by bringing back segregation. The name of this hometown is Dickens.
In addition to this place name (to which I will return), The Sellout references Victorian literature in two scenes. In both, characters African Americanize that literature—that is, they rewrite it with black characters and (stereotypically) black cultural referents. In the later scene, all we see are the reworked titles of Victorian novels, but the earlier scene includes twenty-seven lines of rewritten verse. Thinking back to his childhood, the narrator describes witnessing the birth of gangster rap—the brainchild, we are informed, of a neighborhood crack dealer when “hallucinating high on his own supply and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s brooding lyricism” (37). A pastiche of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (I am tempted to add: of course) titled “The Charge of the Light-Skinned Spade,” the rap begins at the beginning of the poem with “Half a liter, half a liter, / Half a liter onward / All in the alley of Death”; features lines like “Niggers to the right of them, / niggers to the left of them,” and “Theirs not to reason what the fuck, / Theirs but to shoot and duck”; and continues on to the end of the poem: “When can their shine and buzz fade? / Oh the buckwild charge they made! / . . . / Respect the charge of the Light-skinned Spade / The noble now empty Olde English Eight Hundred” (38–39).
As with the use of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (discussed in chapter 2), Beatty’s choice of Tennyson’s poem is likely determined more by the poem’s remarkably unfaded currency in the culture at large than by the specific history of African American engagement I trace; indeed, rather than hint at these historical links, Beatty underscores and plays for laughs the incongruity between the occasion and diction of Tennyson’s poem and that of Carl “Kilo G” Garfield. If it is not immediately clear whether the joke here is on Tennyson or gangster rap (or both), it may be because Beatty’s real target is neither, but instead the very concerns over racial authenticity, cross-racial appropriation, and aesthetic value an origin story such as this one might be expected to raise. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is the perfect vehicle for mounting this critique, since, as we have seen, the poem has been enlisted in this discourse from the moment of its publication.
The trope of rewriting Victorian texts with African American content returns briefly later in The Sellout. Here Beatty’s target is the pedagogical impulse to render such texts, now understood as “classics” or “the Canon” (165), relevant to African Americans and free of racism—an impulse, Beatty suggests, that only reinscribes that racism and serves the self-promoting ends of would-be race leaders. Thus, the narrator’s nemesis Foy Cheshire—the character who dubs the narrator “the Sellout” for the perceived inadequacy of his commitment to black culture—begins by replacing “the repugnant ’n-word’” in Huckleberry Finn with “warrior” and “improv[ing] Jim’s diction” (95), and soon is promoting a curriculum featuring such titles as Uncle Tom’s Condo and The Point Guard in the Rye alongside Measured Expectations and Middlemarch Middle of April, I’ll Have Your Money—I Swear (165, 217). Although Beatty’s inclusion of both British and American titles might suggest that the Victorianness of these latter two works is not significant, these novels—especially Eliot’s—stand out here as the only ones mentioned (aside from Stowe’s, an easily accounted-for exception) that are not standard middle-school or high-school texts (indeed, Beatty also mentions The Great Blacksby and The Old Black Man and the Inflatable Winnie the Pooh Swimming Pool [165, 217]). The Sellout thus registers the particular affinity of African Americanizers for Victorian literature—an affinity the disdainful narrator perhaps has in mind when he names one of the strains of marijuana he grows “Anglophobia” (64).
Yet Beatty himself seems to extend the tradition of engagement he mocks, not only by mocking it but also, as noted above, by naming the Compton-like “ghetto community on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles” in which the story is set “Dickens” (27). The scene of virtually all the novel’s action, Dickens is also at the center of its plot. As the narrator explains, the municipality’s bad reputation and the effect of this reputation on the property values of nearby neighborhoods have led to its “disappearance” (57): “One clear South Central morning,” he recounts, “we awoke to find that . . . the signs that said Welcome to the City of Dickens were gone” (58); this “erasure” is so complete that Internet searches for “Dickens” almost exclusively turn up “references to ‘Dickens, Charles John Huffam’” (57, 58). The narrative tracks the narrator’s attempt to “Bring back Dickens,” including literally putting “Dickens . . . back on the map” (78, 284).
Why Dickens? The one specific allusion to Dickens’s writings in The Sellout (beyond the mention of Measured Expectations) offers an answer: presenting his plan to bring back Dickens to a neighborhood group, the narrator draws a box and labels the inside “Dickens” and “The Worst of Times,” and the outside “White America” and “The Best of Times” (99).17 However, Beatty does not develop the analogy between his novel and A Tale of Two Cities any further, as if to keep his distance from the African Americanizing practices he depicts. The relationship between African American and Victorian literature here remains unsettled and under negotiation.
The Sellout thus resonates provocatively with the tradition traced in this book and stands as a timely warning against consigning it entirely to the past. It is an especially fitting text with which to conclude this study, however, not only because it keeps this tradition alive but also because it does so, in part, by allegorizing its renewal or recovery: “Bring back Dickens.” Taking my own cue, then, from the appropriative spirit characteristic of this tradition of engagement, from Frederick Douglass’s reprinting and Hannah Crafts’s reworking of Bleak House to W.E.B. Du Bois’s transformation of “The Blessed Damozel,” I will end by proposing that we read The Sellout as an allegory of the present volume itself—which has sought to direct searches for Dickens (and other Victorian authors) toward African American locations, and to advance understanding of African American literature and print culture by putting Victorian literature back on the map.