“I’d sing you a song if I could sing”: Art and Artifice in Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby

Ah, well, I didn’t say it was possible. I said, Try.

—Ellen Douglas, Can’t Quit You, Baby

Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby (1988) is a prismatic and profoundly subtle novel. And yet, despite its impressive mélange of competing voices and points of view, strategies and techniques, styles and modes—all of which forced readers to approach the narrative from a variety of angles—the novel’s prose and central action quietly belie its ambition. Ostensibly, Can’t Quit You, Baby is about the fraught, long-time relationship of a white mistress, Cornelia, and her African American housekeeper, Julia (nicknamed Tweet), in Civil Rights-era Mississippi. But the novel is in fact as much about the narrator’s—the “tale-teller’s”—struggle to tell a tale that can transcend racial barriers (or is at least capable of it) and at last bring these two women together as true friends, true equals. Such is the layered, pluralistic nature of this novel. Douglas is a magician of novelistic multitasking, and I say “magician” because the multiple, simultaneous tasks are often in contention with one another: the ostensible plot, for example, largely falls under the tradition of realist mimetic fiction, whereas the metafictive tale-teller, among other features, is a staple of postmodern fiction—that is to say, fiction (post-WWII) that employs pastiche, incorporates (often self-consciously and -referentially) a number of divergent styles/traditions, and in some way fractures or challenges the coherence of a single reliable version of a narrative. In brief, this essay will discuss a variety of ways in which Can’t Quit You, Baby struggles with and against itself; how it both offers and remains skeptical of racial reconciliation, interrogating and embracing the potential for change; how it paradoxically succeeds by failing; how it frees itself from the “illusion of freedom” (38); and how it—like Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants (1971)¹—functions within and at the same time abandons the conventions of popular realist mimetic fiction.

Before moving forward, however, it’s important to note what “racial barriers” means in the context of this essay, which is precisely, if only partly, what it means in the world at large: it means that “racism is ordinary,” a tenet critical race theorists have long proclaimed. With the exception of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr—an historical tragedy that, in the novel, given the emotional vulnerability such an event engenders, ushers in a scene of potential connection and/or intimacy between Tweet and Cornelia—the racial barriers discussed in this essay, the conflicts Can’t Quit You, Baby attempts (for these two women, at least) to overcome, are not shocking, barefaced discriminations, but rather Cornelia’s continual rehearsal, however unconscious, of quotidian racism, that “system of formalized distortions of thought” (73), to borrow a phrase from Patricia J. Williams, that underpin our daily lives: untold microaggressions; legal rationalizations; feelings of moral or intellectual or civic superiority. As Suzanne W. Jones states in “Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough to Tell”: “Cornelia, whom Douglas marks physically as hard of hearing, politely listens to Tweet’s stories about white injustice and black hardship, marital infidelity and familial competition over land. But Cornelia does not hear in these stories the evidence of institutionalized racism in the town’s law offices and banks that Ellen Douglas makes sure her readers discern” (31). So long as such underpinnings are upheld, so long as Cornelia fails to discern as well as acknowledge the “ordinary racism” that circumscribes their lives, our two protagonists remain distant strangers; as in Magritte’s L’Assassin Menace (which I’ll discuss later and which appears in chapter five of the novel), the two women remain—despite their physical proximity to one another—in separate spheres, inauspiciously nonintegrated; indeed, unintegrable.

Let us begin, plainly, with an examination of the style and technical features of Douglas’s prose, so entwined with the book’s subject matter, the most...