“In Despair and Contemplating Suicide”: A Critique of Passing in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of the Village”

CLA JOURNAL 305 “In Despair and Contemplating Suicide:” A Critique of Passing in Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Stones of the Village” Donavan L. Ramon Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a prolific poet, educator, journalist, and political activist, yet literary critics have not paid as much attention to her as her work warrants (West 5). Those who did evaluate her work often placed her in relation to male writers, such as her first husband Paul Laurence Dunbar and fellow local color writer George Washington Cable. In his study of black writers, for instance, Vernon Loggins argues that her writing was not as good as that of her “master” — referring specifically to Cable (318). His use of the term “master” highlights the ways in which scholars evaluated her work in the context of a predominantly male literary establishment in the early twentieth century. Literary scholars have since couched their responses to her writing not in sexist rhetoric, but by citing her conventional style and the ostensible racelessness of her work. Jordan Stouck argues that the main problem with Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is that her “activism contrasts with her rather conventional narrative forms” (271). Gloria Hull notes that her writing is separated “from her black experience” (Color, Sex, Poetry 52) despite her role in creating “a black short-story tradition”(“Introduction”xxxi-xxxii). Frustrated by the difficulties in determining the racial identities of Dunbar-Nelson’s characters,Violet Harrington Bryan agrees with Hull by calling Dunbar-Nelson’s treatment of race “ambivalent” (“The Myth of New Orleans” 71). Her gradual use of racial themes coincided with changes in her personal life, thus making race more problematic for her (“Race & Gender” 133). On the other hand, Kristina Brooks believes that the problem lies in “the reader’s response to characters whose race does not verifiably adhere to one side of the black-white binary” (8). According to Brooks, focusing on Dunbar-Nelson’s seemingly ambivalent characterizations is moot and readers are at fault for not seeing through racial dualities. In recent years, literary scholars have started to re-evaluate Dunbar-Nelson’s ideas on form and race. Whereas they still question her portrayal of the latter, her own characterizations provide insight into her conception of the former: not only was she Creole, but she also portrayed several of her characters as Creole as well. “Creole” was a contested meaning in early twentieth century New Orleans, since whites often excluded those of African descent from their conception of Creoles. Grace King, George Washington Cable, and Kate Chopin, for instance, created 306 CLA JOURNAL Donavan L. Ramon Creole fiction that often excluded an African presence, while historian Charles Gayarré argued that “the Creoles of Louisiana . . . have not, because of the name they bear, a particle of African blood in their veins”(qtd. in Domínguez 144). Alice Dunbar-Nelson rejected these assertions throughout her literary career.In her essay “A Creole Anomaly” (1897), she asserts that Creoles are of French, Spanish, and African descent. Almost two decades later, in “People of Color in Louisiana, Part I” (1916), she notes that the blood of Louisiana Creoles contains “mixed strains of everything un-American, with the African strain slightly apparent” (367). By placing more importance on the African presence in Creoles in this second essay, she underscores her evolving ideas on the visibility of blackness in Creole ancestry. Nevertheless, Dunbar-Nelson always maintained that“Creoles identifying as white would adamantly reject the idea of African descent” according to literary scholar Caroline Gebhard (338). One such Creole who attempted this rejection is Victor Grabért, the protagonist of her short story “The Stones of the Village”. Victor is a light-skinned Creole raised by his darker-skinned grandmother in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Louisiana. He passes as white to earn a college degree and become a lawyer, but his racialized subjectivity is revealed at the end of the narrative as he prepares for a coveted judgeship. The text follows a conventional plot of a person who passes, achieves professional status, and loses it when his racial duplicity unravels.1 In the process, his family members all die, and his own death entails choking on mysterious black substance...