Can't I Love What I Criticize?: The Masculine and Morrison

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [Firs [299 Line —— -0.9 —— Norm PgEn [299 Notes Chapter One. Something Other Than a Family Quarrel 1. Defining a womanist as a black feminist, Alice Walker’s theory encompasses the survival of a community, female and male. This African American writer claims that “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender” (xi–xii). 2. Walker re-creates black female conflictedness between race and gender into story. See “Advancing Luna and Ida B. Wells” in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down. Chapter Two. Black Boys, White Gaze 1. Morrison asserts during an interview: “I write without gender focus. . . . It happens that what provokes my imagination as a writer has to do with the culture of black people. I regard the whole world as my canvas and I write out of that sensibility of what I find provocative and the sensibility of being a woman. But I don’t write women’s literature as such. I think it would confine me. I am valuable as a writer because I am a woman, because women, it seems to me, have some special knowledge about certain things. [It comes from] the ways in which they view the world, and from women’s imagination. Once it is unruly and let loose, it can bring things to the surface that men—trained to be men in a certain way— have difficulty getting access to” (qtd. in Awkward 136). The children described in Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture ask an androgynous griot to “tell [them] what it is to be a woman so that [they] may know what it is to be a man” (28). A growing number of contemporary critics on black masculinity, whom Guy Sheftall calls “black male feminists” (347)—a term Awkward argues is not an “oxymoronic formulation” (5)—employ feminist analytical frameworks and reject masculinist paradigms. What Neal calls the “New Black Man,” in other words, incorporates varied practices of masculinity that struggle to be antisexist and antihomophobic, reflecting and embracing an African cultural history of androgyny and bisexuality. 299 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [300 Line —— 0.1 —— Norm PgEn [300 2. Because these values have become so pervasive in American culture, their debilitating effects victimize people across real or imagined binaries of race, class, and gender. However, recent scholars distinguish African American masculinity from the larger field of masculinity studies; Hazel Carby argues compellingly that the pressure on black manhood entitles it to a racial representativeness of crisis not accorded black womanhood (9–41). 3. See my article “Symbols in the Sewer: A Symbolic Renunciation of Symbols in Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground.” I include such comparisons to other literary texts and figures not to validate Morrison’s work but to expand the literary imaginations of my readers. 4. It is fruitful to note all the references to food in this scene. Mr. Henry, like Marie, receives some physical gratification by replacing touch with food. The churchwomen, on the other hand, remain concerned with clean plates. Mama declares to her girls that she would not let a bad woman like Marie eat off even one of hers. 5. Faulkner also introduces a child to life’s underbelly in a section of Sanctuary that Malcolm Cowley calls “Uncle Bud and the Three Madams.” 6. While Morrison’s novels do not reject the possibility that some pedophiliac crimes remain irreducible traits in human nature irrespective of cultural particularity , she renders characters such as Mr. Henry, Cholly, Soaphead Church, and Bill Cosey to suggest, with Franklin, that many problems are “individually caused and culturally nurtured” (359). 7. Beavers maintains that a secular world no longer requiring “rituals whose sacred vessels include an uncommodified earth and sky” causes Morrison’s characters to “fall victim to their appetites.” Analyzing the influence of spatial politics on southern black males who move north, he confirms that desire in the new landscape becomes an end unto itself. Hence, Morrison’s characters tie manhood to the world of...