The Illusions of Phallic Agency: Invisible Man, Totem and Taboo, and the Santa Claus Surprise

The tradition of writing by African-American men has often figured the deprivation of freedom as a deprivation of manhood and the recovery of social agency as a recovery of manhood. This rhetoric has relied on phallic language and imagery that implicitly excludes women from the struggle for liberation. Ralph Ellison's early short story "The Birthmark" neatly illustrates such rhetoric when a lynch mob castrates a man whose brother and sister are then threatened with the same fate, effectively reducing all the black characters to women's disenfranchised state. Although Ellison's 1952 novel also includes such phallic language, the narrator of Invisible Man eventually realizes that such male-centered rhetoric only provides an illusion of social agency. The narrator's laughter when faced with castration near the novel's close typifies Ellison's rejection of the phallus as a symbol of empowerment.