Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with the Wind

4. Scarlett and Mammy Done Gone: Complications of the Contemporary Novel of Slavery, 1986–2003

149 4 Scarlett and Mammy Done Gone complications of the contemporary novel of slavery, 1986–2003 indred’s innovative strategies for representing American slavery in fiction swiftly became predominant. Virtually all novels concerned with the peculiar institution published since the 1970s combine conventional realism with postmodernist intertextuality, and thus engage with slavery both as contested historical reality and as a tradition of conflicting cultural representations . Such fiction demands careful and nuanced interpretation. The reader must be sensitive to the fundamental distinctions between a novel’s arguments about the actualities of slavery and its responses to established textual conventions for representing slavery. In this chapter, I explore the complicated relationship between slavery as historiographical debate and slavery as a set of discursive conventions in two novels, Sherley Anne Williams ’s Dessa Rose (1986) and Valerie Martin’s Property (2003). There are good reasons for considering these two particular works of fiction together. The many critics who have discussed Dessa Rose tend to focus upon the manner in which the book’s eponymous African American heroine evades both the literal and the linguistic chains of slavery: Dessa not only leads a rebellion and escapes to freedom, but she also tells her own story about life inside and outside the institution. In terms of literary history , Williams’s novel is also notable for its rehabilitation of a figure that had become even more marginal in slavery fiction than the female slave: the plantation mistress. Property goes a step further in this regard by having its entire narrative told from the perspective of Manon Gaudet, the wife of a K recto calls and responses 150 Louisiana slaveholder—a point of view previously unexplored in the modern novel of American slavery. Property is additionally significant for being the first novel of substance about slavery by a white writer published in more than thirty years. The Confessions of Nat Turner—or, more specifically, the critical reaction to it—essentially shut down all opportunities for a fruitful discourse between black and white writers of slavery fiction. African American critics, exempli fied by the Ten Black Writers, were justified, of course, in condemning William Styron’s unqualified acceptance of the questionable conclusions of Stanley Elkins in his fictionalization of the Turner insurrection. However , the virulence of some of the attacks on The Confessions of Nat Turner apparently discouraged white novelists from engaging with the subject of slavery at all for three decades. In some respects, this was an advantageous, even necessary, development. Slavery fiction of the first half of the century had been dominated by white writers (with Black Thunder and The Foxes of Harrow being rare exceptions to the rule). With white novelists reluctant to address the subject after the Styron debacle, African American writers made the best of the opportunity of a now-open field, and constructed a powerful literature and discourse of their own about slavery. Beginning with Margaret Walker’s Jubilee in 1966, the final third of the twentieth century saw a resurgence in black fiction about slavery that has produced some of the most powerful books in contemporary American literature, including Kindred, Beloved, and, most recently, The Known World. After more than twenty-five years of such achievements by African American authors, however, the omission of white novelists from the cultural conversation about slavery in the United States has become a limitation . Notably, both Dessa Rose and Property are fundamentally concerned with the notion of constructive interracial debate about slavery. In the absence of a dialogue about slavery between white and black novelists in the late twentieth century, Dessa Rose imaginatively projects just such an interracial dialogue into the antebellum era, by creating a dynamic fictional relationship between a plantation mistress and a female slave. Property, meanwhile—as the work of a white novelist—initiates a new interracial conversation between black and white writers on the subject of slavery for the twenty-first century. Property and Dessa Rose also appear to be instances of the hybrid form 151 of slavery fiction exemplified by Kindred. Both seem to combine the conventions of realism with explicit intertextuality, and to engage with slavery as both discursive tradition and historical reality. Dessa Rose, for example, directly responds to works of history, such as Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts, as well as works of fiction, specifically The Confessions of Nat Turner. Property implicitly interrogates the depiction of...