Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature

Introduction: Recognizing the Dead

As a general rule, dead women are rather quiet. The same goes for dead men. But in American literature, the dead talk more often than we might expect—especially women. They appear in works by such classic American writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and William Faulkner, as well as in more recent work by Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and Alice Walker, among many others. Now, it is almost old hat when dead women talk in contemporary literature and popular culture, from Alice Sebold ’s best-selling novel The Lovely Bones to the hit television dramas Desperate Housewives and Drop Dead Diva. What are we to make of all these women? Collectively, these dead women, at least the more literary ones, constitute a tradition in which writers address pressing social issues that refuse to stay dead. When they talk, they speak not only to their own lives but also to matters of justice, history, and dearly held national ideals—whether the community welcomes it or not. Thus, writers stage encounters with that which should be past but has not passed. For instance, an American narrator encounters atrophied lines of aristocratic privilege in Poe’s 1839 tale “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Or, in Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, a mother confronts slavery’s legacy a generation after its demise. And in Kushner’s Angels in America, Ethel Rosenberg sits at the deathbed of Roy Cohn in Reagan-era America, taunting the man who orchestrated her notorious McCarthy-era execution. Dead women tend to talk in American literature when their experiences of death can address an issue of injustice that their communities might prematurely consign to the past. When declarations of injustice’s end do not coincide with the achievement of actual justice, the resulting gaps create spaces from which these women speak. In a meditation on death and subjectivity, theorist Colin Davis asks, “Can the Dead Speak to Us?” He suggests that we introduction Recognizing the Dead 2 Dead Women Talking are more likely to hear our own words imposed on the dead, though their traces may be found in moments of surprise, that which we can’t anticipate.1 Inside literary worlds, though, dead women need not wait for a discerning listener attentive to the indirect and unexpected, nor must they accept the passivity their deceased status entails. They can speak for themselves. In doing so, they raise questions about gender and voice, sexual violence and nonnormative sexuality, class privilege and cross-class contact, reparations for past racial injustices, and the immigrant’s fraught relationship with national identity, among other pressing concerns. Of all the examples of dead women talking in American literature, Beloved stands as the prototypical example. Long after Sethe, an escaped slave, commits the horrific act of infanticide to spare her daughter from life as chattel, Beloved returns full-grown and with an insatiable hunger. The murdered girlchild is neither mere corpse nor figure of speech. Denver, Beloved’s surviving sister, describes her as a “greedy ghost,”2 but that category, too, is insufficient. Paul D asks, “You think she sure ’nough your sister?” Denver responds, “At times. At times I think she was—more” (314). Beloved’s power derives in part from her inability to be categorized. So too, her fellow dead women talking arise as unfamiliar, strange figures, often disrupting an otherwise realist mode underpinning the story. They resemble such familiar figures as ghosts, zombies ,spirits,revenants,vampires,mediums,mythicalfigures,andevencorpses, but they are more. The horror of Beloved is not only that the dead woman has a body and talks but that she seeks membership in and recognition by a living, present community. She is not sequestered in dead spaces such as a tomb or even the slave ship’s hull. Nor is she an abstract allegory of the past or synecdoche of black suffering in general. She is not content to stay in the realm of the dead, to speak from her tombstone as in Edgar Lee Masters’s popular 1915 sequence of epitaph poems in Spoon River Anthology, or to relive past experience as a dead watcher as in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town. Rather, as I will argue in chapter five, Beloved inserts herself into the community in search of something else: citizenship. The appeal for a posthumous form of citizenship may seem more pedestrian than that of, say, a vampire in search of blood, but such a request requires that...