Frank Webb's Still Life: Rethinking Literature and Politics through The Garies and Their Friends

Literary critics such as Claudia Tate and Ann duCille have taught us to think differently about form and class in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century African-American literature. They have qualified the charges of acquiescence leveled against the literature of respectability or "uplift": the charges that such literature adopted white middle-class values of industry, frugality, circumspection, and moral purity in a bid for social acceptance, and that such literature was distinguished by condescension towards the African-American masses and surrender to the dominant culture.

Tate argues that African-American women novelists in the 1890s presented to their readers "allegories of political desire." Rather than domestic mimesis, Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins offered shrewd portrayals of the gap between an imagined world of ideal courtship and marriage and the actual world of racial injury. In Tate's words, such novels offered "cultural description as symbolic representation, not transparent presentation" (101). Analyzing the gap, revealing the deeper story beneath the surface, Tate finds not false consciousness but narratives that indicate a tempered hope for social equality and female agency.

For duCille, African-American women novelists in the early twentieth century such as Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen transmuted marriage conventions and subversively explored issues of freedom in a racist society, articulating black feminine self-consciousness and desire. These novels were "not transparent documents" giving access to racial authenticity or communal practice, but strategic contributions to debates about gender, race, and citizenship (45). Responding to Hazel Carby's argument about repression and sublimation in Harper's 1894 novel of "uplift," Iola Leroy, Tate argues that "sexual desire is not displaced by social purpose but encoded in it—regulated, submerged, and insinuated into the much safer realm of political zeal and the valorized venue of holy wedlock" (16). Both Tate and duCille insist that knowledge about historical context enables new perspectives, allowing modern readers to perceive significance in details of plot, character, gesture, and setting—to look at, rather than merely through, these novels. In resisting "transparency" and in reconstructing a historical aesthetics, they argue against the distillations of African-American literature to sociology or racial essence.

The rethinking of "uplift" among literary critics and historians may help to further the aesthetic reconsiderations currently underway in literary studies.¹ American novelists of racial manners, black and white, reflect on the intimacies of context, gesture, and consequence. The scrutiny of these works, prompted by Tate, duCille, and others, alters our understanding of the relationship between literature and politics and tests our critical assumptions. Redirecting literary focus from the post Reconstruction to the antebellum period and from novels by womo a male-authored text, I will use the dislocating example of Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel about Philadelphia, The Garies and Their Friends, to suggest that we may not have gone far enough in appreciating literary surface. We may not yet have grasped the intricacy and recalcitrance of these novels of racial manners, over-estimating the need for allegories or subversions to decode meanings that are seen to lie above or below the words on the page. Nineteenth-century works such as The Garies and Their Friends may turn out to be even less transparent and more revealing than critics such as Tate and duCille propose. These literary texts insist that we read their details closely, attend to their volatile manners, and understand how these gestures are part of a struggle over position and a meditation on history and conduct.²

The Garies and Their Friends was published in London in 1857 by G. Routledge and Co., the chief promoters of American authors to the British public. The novel originally appeared in two editions, an expensive blue-cloth volume, blind-stamped and lettered in gilt, and a cheaper edition, bound in thin yellow boards. The two editions suggest that Routledge imagined the book would appeal to elite and popular audiences. Both editions contained two brief prefaces, one by Lord Brougham, who had been instrumental in passing the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and the...