The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness by Veronica T. Watson (review)

The African American literary canon, like the larger American literary canon from which it was once excluded, has not been without problems of exclusivity itself. Veronica T. Watson’s The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness offers a laudable case for its expansion in a series of essays covering many underappreciated works by Black authors. Watson argues that critics and general audiences alike have paid little attention to “White life” novels or other works by African American writers about white characters. African American literature, she notes, is lamentably confined in the critical and popular imagination to “black writers writing about Black subjects,” and The Souls of White Folk is a corrective endeavor aimed at encouraging critical interest in underappreciated and under-examined African American writers who look beyond conventional “Black” topics (9).

For this reason, Watson elects to take an “unorthodox” approach to her subject, dividing The Souls of White Folk into thematically and theoretically organized chapters in order to “suggest the breadth of possibility” for further investigation into White life literature (12). Watson’s first chapter applies Gilded Age medical texts on neurasthenia to “The Coming of John” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream, arguing that White society used the diagnosis as a “comfortable companion” to scientific racism, linking the disorder to intelligence and high sentiment and constructing it as an exclusively white disease (21). Du Bois and Chesnutt, she argues, portray the neurasthenic white man as afflicted not by a harmless medical condition, but by a harmful and destabilizing malady resulting from the “schizophrenic” desires to reclaim the interracial relationships they experienced during slavery while also segregating themselves to preserve their Whiteness (32). Chapter 2 envisions Southern white womanhood in Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow and Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee as “a hybridized identity … that is always already in a rhetorical dialogue with Blackness” (71). The Foxes of Harrow’s Odalie Arceneaux, Watson suggests, remains emotionally and sexually unavailable to her husband in order to differentiate herself from the slave women who lack her capacity for autonomy, and Seraph’s Arvay similarly relies on dissimilarities between herself and Black women for her sense of self-worth. Chapter 3 largely departs from fiction, focusing upon racial space and segregation in Melba Beals’s autobiographical Warriors Don’t Cry, and revealing a violent, reactionary form of White identity defined by spatial dissociation from racial others. Lacking a critical double consciousness, the white students and parents of Central High, Watson claims, employ violence and intimidation against the Little Rock Nine in order to maintain an illusory oneness within the White community in the face of changing attitudes toward racial segregation and the dissolution of legal boundaries between White and Black spaces.

In addition to focusing on an oft-overlooked literature of White estrangement, Watson brings much needed critical attention to commonly forgotten or less-than canonical authors. Her choice to study Yerby together with Hurston is particularly interesting. As a Black writer who successfully competed with white authors in the literary market, Yerby’s fiction warrants more critical attention, and placing his first novel alongside Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee—which is itself often ignored for being insufficiently “Black”—vindicates his reputation as a significant figure in African American literary history. Though neither Seraph nor Yerby’s Foxes of Harrow is outwardly concerned primarily with race, Watson’s treatment of their shared subtext regarding the “psychological maneuvering” by which society encouraged Southern white women to endorse racial and class-based elitism makes a convincing case for their significance as critical works on White estrangement (68). Her analysis of Warriors Don’t Cry extends this literary attention to nonfiction, exploring the reality of White identity as Beals experienced it firsthand at the forefront of the desegregation movement, and the different form of psychological maneuvering by which the divided White community...