The Entombed Maternal in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills

Throughout the history of Western culture, motherhood and maternal experience have been largely defined by other forces, or, as Susan Suleiman writes, "Mothers don't write, they are written" (356). The construction of women through art, literature, psychoanalysis, religion, politics, and other bastions of male power have often left women silenced and mute about the most intimate of female experiences: the bearing and raising of children. While women's literature of recent decades has brought new openness and veracity to the fictional depiction of motherhood, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills, published in 1985, remains an apocryphal cautionary tale about the impact of patriarchal oppression on the body and voice of the mother. The novel is set in the mythical Linden Hills, a middle-class black community of "lost black souls trapped in the American Dream" (Watkins 11). The place is presided over by businessman and mortuary owner Luther Nedeed, a fifth generation descendent of an earlier Luther Nedeed, who sold his wife and six children into slavery to buy the land upon which to build Linden Hills. The present-day Nedeed perpetuates his forefather's avarice and cruelty through his soulless manipulation of others, especially his wife Willa, whose subterranean ordeal provides the primary maternal narrative and defining metaphor in Linden Hills.

Since the novel's publication, significant critical treatment has been given to the outer, social world of Linden Hills, including its rigid stratifications, false values, and crippling impact on its residents. Attention has largely focused on the patriarchal aspects of the novel, with the maternal elements of the text subsumed into that discussion. Indeed, patriarchal history and traditions ostensibly dominate the novel and determine its central conflicts. However, Naylor also creates a powerful maternal subtext that functions in opposition to these forces. While Linden Hills reveals a systematic effacement of women, it also portrays female resistance that eventually brings down the House of Nedeed. This, too, is generational in the making, with Willa being the final arbiter who exacts revenge on behalf of herself and earlier Nedeed wives, who lived shadow existences as well. Today, Linden Hills invites new scrutiny of its portrayal of motherhood and the manifestations of the maternal. This study attempts to explore more fully the gynocentrism of Naylor's text, specifically the body and voice of the mother, the role of "herstory" and memory, and the variations of female experience within the novel.

The story of Willa Prescott Nedeed, whose name is not revealed until late in the novel, serves as the basis from which other maternal narratives emerge. When she fails to produce a suitable male heir, one dark enough to carry on the family line, her husband believes their pale, sickly son cannot possibly be his. Ironically, Luther Nedeed fails to take into consideration the genetic contributions of the child's paternal grandmothers, light-skinned women that previous generations of Nedeed men had married. In the five years following his son's birth, his resentment of Willa festers and becomes monstrous. Nedeed, deciding he must "turn her into a wife," imprisons both mother and child in a former morgue in the basement of the family home (Naylor, Linden Hills 9). Willa's screams of anguish leave him unmoved when the ailing child dies in the old morgue, a grim chamber symbolic of both womb and tomb. With little to sustain her, Willa is left to grieve her lost child and her own abandoned state. Still imprisoned, she happens upon an old trunk and discovers other generations of Nedeed women who have preceded her. In the underground morgue, she unearths female texts, "herstories" that have been suppressed and silenced by the patriarchy. Through them, she is able to reclaim a sense of power and identity that her entombment has threatened to eradicate. There is both triumph and tragedy in Naylor's rendering of the maternal, with Willa's entombment and subsequent liberation providing the foundation for this portrayal.

In certain respects, Willa's search through "herstory" could be read as Naylor's efforts to restore a sense of female community that is so critical in African and...