-
A House Is Not a Home
- The University of Tennessee Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 Burning Down the Master’s House: Linden Hills A House Is Not a Home Like The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills examines the buried history of African Americans in terms of the creative, often clandestine , acts of rebellion arising from subaltern women. That these gestures of revolt in Naylor’s second novel originate from the middleclass wife and mother calls into question notions of marriage not only as the sine qua non for personal fulfillment but also as the basis of an aristocratic social order. Women and, by implication, the feminine constitute the foundation of the masculine Empire figured by successive Luther Nedeed’s reign over a posh suburban neighborhood . All that is required in an overthrow of this rule is women’s awakeningtotherealityofacenturies-oldsubjugationandthepower that gendered difference implies. Such an arousal occurs through a discovery of women’s history and the revelation of the proactive subjectivity on the part of the subaltern. The novel thus chronicles the journey toward self-assertion that the middle-class wife makes once she recognizes her latent revolutionary potentiality. Naylor’s fictionalization of life among the suburban elite prompts her to make a distinction between the metaphor of house, a construct bound with established ideas of time, space, and identity , and that of home, a fluid configuration relevant to the border subject’s ability to fashion a hybrid self unencumbered by essentialist designations. Iterations of the house-home dichotomy are resonant with feminist ideology and concepts about women’s entrapment within what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe as “the architecture—both the houses and the institutions—of patriarchy” 22 Burning Down the Master’s House | Linden Hills (85). They point out that, “[l]iterally confined to the house, figuratively confined to a single ‘place,’ enclosed in parlors and encased in texts, imprisoned in kitchens and enshrined in stanzas, women artists naturally found themselves describing dark interiors and confusing their sense that they were house-bound with their rebellion against being duty bound” (84). For the nineteenth-century woman writer struggling with issues of literary authority, dramatizations of enclosure and escape are so prevalent that they constitute a uniquely female tradition. Naylor’s second novel offers a cultured, twentieth-century extension of that tradition with the account of Willa’s spectacular ascent from her basement locus of exile. That she returns to the kitchen while carrying out housekeeping tasks places her in a long line of housewife-revolutionaries torn between a social identity as wife and mother and the public role of agent for social change. As the last woman in the Nedeed clan, Willa is to dismantle the master’s house of patriarchal privilege and thereby disrupt the aristocratic ideology governing life in Linden Hills. Of the various institutional sites figuring into the novel’s fictional geography—the church, school, social clubs, and corporate arena—not one exists outside the purview of masculine control. Yet Naylor’s concern is not so much with the public spaces defining a contemporary suburban landscape as with domestic space and its potential as either an extension of white, patriarchal authority or a locus for self-definition. Slavery offers a nineteenth-century nexus for an investigation of marriage and family under capitalist domination . Rumors that the first Luther Nedeed acquires the money used to purchase the land that later becomes Linden Hills by selling his octoroon wife and six children place the wealthy land baron in the dual role of husband and master. Successive generations of wives are valued solely in terms of their commodity status or procreative ability as breeders—a truth that places women in a situation not far removed from slavery. The suppression of difference is the single most defining strategy underlying the elitist ideology among residents of Linden Hills. [3.236.55.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:13 GMT) 23 Burning Down the Master’s House | Linden Hills As the omniscient narrator points out, “Linden Hills wasn’t black; it was successful. The shining surface of their careers, brass railings, and cars hurt his eyes because it only reflected the bright nothing that was inside of them.”1 But Naylor’s portrait of middle-class life reveals the difficulties associated with efforts to deny, contain, or circumscribe a cultured, gendered identity. Aspects of difference assert themselves at every turn, thereby disrupting a seemingly seamless story involving the search for a home divorced from agrarian associations. Much of Linden Hills involves Naylor’s attempt to challenge established truth associated with a...