A Prayer for Mourning: Seduction and Trauma in Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie

Let there be veils. Let there be protections and escapes from the knowledge we are condemned to work so hard at discovering.

Carolivia Herron, Thereafter Johnnie

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

The 1991 publication of Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie found praise in both academic and nonacademic circles. The New York Times Book Review asserts that her "fascinating and highly original first novel belongs in the distinguished company of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gloria Naylor's wickedly satirical Linden Hills" (Bierhorst 16). The critic for the New Statesman writes that Herron's "incandescent and visionary prose-poetry is capable, like a divinely wrought gospel song, of raising the hairs on the back of your neck or moving you to tears" (Stuart 41). Henry Louis Gates calls the novel a "remarkable achievement" and Herron "the fourth Fury" (dust jacket). Barbara Christian opens her review for the Women's Review of Books with the pronouncement, "I am dazzled, literally, by the intense light of Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie" (Christian, "Epic" 6).¹ And yet in the thirteen years since its publication, Thereafter Johnnie has received surprisingly little critical attention.²

But perhaps the lack of critical attention should not be so surprising. In addition to praising Herron's novel in her review, Christian also anticipates that feminists, an audience to which the novel could be expected to appeal, might find it disturbing, not because of "the theme of incest per se" but because of her method of presentation:

[Herron] does not present father/daughter incest, as Alice Walker does in The Color Purple, as a powerful father figure's brutal assault upon a helpless girl-child, or as Toni Morrison does in The Bluest Eye, as a powerless father's sense that sexual love is all he can give his wounded daughter. In Thereafter Johnnie both father and daughter seduce each other, so that it is difficult to distinguish between "who was the possessor, and who was the possessed." And Herron writes of their sexual intercourse in a language so erotic it approaches the divine.

(6)

Herron's erotic descriptions of incest are, indeed, disturbing not only because both father and daughter draw pleasure and pain from the incestuous acts but also because the language of these passages threatens to inflict both pleasure and pain on the reader as well. But whether the novel has disturbed feminists or other audiences, for that matter, is unclear because so few scholars have responded to it in writing.

Christian's comment seems to imply that feminists are more likely than others to be disturbed because Herron chooses to make the seduction mutual and, therefore, to represent Patricia as actively seducing her father. In doing so, Herron risks casting Patricia as the Seductive Daughter, "one of the two major culprits in the incest romance" (Herman 36), thereby enabling readings that relieve the incestuous father of both responsibility and blame. I would argue, however, that while the characters seem to accept both this explanation for incest and the myths that support it, the novel does not. By having her characters (almost compulsively) interpret Patricia and John Christopher's relationship, Herron anticipates the various discourses readers invoke in order to deal with narratives of incest—those of victimization, morality, and psychology—and reveals them to be inadequate. Rather than champion a version of Freud's feminine Oedipus complex or what Jung called the Electra complex, Thereafter Johnnie reveals how Freud's revised ideas about infant abuse have offered its readers a way out of the complexities of the novel. In this essay, I will use theories of narrative and traumatic memory to explore Herron's feminist critique of the Seductive Daughter and of the Western mythologies and twentieth-century interpretive frameworks that have been used to protect the "Poor Father." The...