Sorry I haven't posted anything in a couple of weeks, but I am happy to announce that I have passed my qualifying exam, commonly known as "the orals," as part of my arduous journey toward my doctorate. The exam is two hours long, with each examiner asking questions for 40 minutes each. As my particular focus is 19th century literature of the antebellum era, I was questioned on three field lists: 1) the "American Renaissance" era 2) 19th century women writers (religion, abolition, and women's rights) 3) race and antebellum culture.
My three examiners on the lists were David S. Reynolds (also serving as my dissertation director), Hildegard Hoeller, and Robert Reid-Pharr. I must say, the exam was mentally exhausting, and I felt a bit fatigued when it was over, but I am happy to report that I passed! Having the orals behind me means that I can focus fully on my next phase, which is the dissertation prospectus. I am trying to complete a second draft before I go to my conference in November, so I have set Halloween (my favorite holiday!) as my deadline to submit the draft to Prof. Reynolds. I also will be able to breathe a little easier and post more often to this blog.
My next blog will focus on representations of African American children in two seminal texts of the antebellum era. Want to guess what the texts are?
“White people who say they ‘understand’ the Negro merely mean that they have seen a lot of Negroes around; but this does not imply a mastery of their psychology any more than living next door to Einstein implies a mastery of the theory of relativity.”--Margaret Halsey In November, I’ll be presenting a paper on Margaret Halsey’s Colorblind: A White Woman Looks at the Negro (pub. in 1946) at the 2009 Modern Language Association’s Southern Atlantic regional conference (SAMLA) in Atlanta, Georgia. I'll be a part of the American Humor Studies Association panel, titled “Laughing on the Inside: Humors of Race and Ethnicity.”For now, though, I’ll just post a few paragraphs about the life of this fascinating woman, with more to come later.
Margaret Halsey (1910-1997) was the best-selling author of 1938’s With Malice Toward Some, a humorous take on British customs. The book sold more than 600,000 copies and her fame was seemingly assured. Yet, today, her reputation is no more than a footnote in one or two books and journals, although she is a mainstay on quotation pages. Halsey followed With Malice Toward Some with Some of My Best Friends are Soldiers, A Kind of Novel in 1944, this one based on her experiences throughout World War II as a supervisor of hostesses at New York’s famed Stage Door Canteen. At the time, she was married to Henry Simon, younger brother of Dick Simon, co-founder of the Simon and Shuster publishing company. The marriage to Simon, who was Jewish, heightened Halsey’s awareness of American anti-Semitism. Some of My Best Friends are Soldiers garnered respectable reviews, although nowhere near the esteem or financial success of her first book. Halsey’s experiences at the canteen (one of only two interracial ones in the U.S. during the war) fostered a burgeoning curiosity about the contradictory racial attitudes held by white liberals toward blacks in the post-War atmosphere, so she decided to take a close look. Margaret Halsey begins Colorblind with a response to the question of why she, a humor writer, felt the need to attempt a book on race relations, observing that “The professional humorist catches cold, is jilted in love, pays income tax, and worries about the atomic bomb. If at any time he appears to be merry and relaxed about these phenomena, it is only because he has signed a contract with somebody involving the receipt of money.” Colorblind, emerging from her growing interest in the nascent civil rights movement, is by turns mock-anthropological, pedantic, satiric, and haughty, as she goes about dispensing advice on what white people should know about the “Negro.” Although she insists that her intention is not to write another humor book but to write seriously on the problems of race relations in the United States, Colorblind retains Halsey’s droll comic sense as she uses humor to underscore her outrage over continued racial prejudice: “At college I was first introduced to the social sciences and read in books about the chronic and systematized injustice with which our Negro citizens have to contend. This filled me with a sense of outrage, but the people around me persisted in being Caucasian and I could think of nothing specific and immediate to do.” In writing Colorblind, Halsey notes that she is troubled by the mixture of “innocence, ignorance, indifference and inexperience” she perceives in herself and among “a great many other well-meaning white Americans” who are also concerned about race relations. “I thought that they, in particular, might be interested in the reflections and conclusions hereinafter contained.”Her aim also is to destroy myths about blacks that she felt were detrimental to the ideals of American democracy. She states at the outset that her book is written to and for whites—blacks already are painfully aware of prejudice and discrimination, but whites are often blind to its devastating effects. In Halsey’s view, lack of proximity is a problem—propinquity would help to resolve it. That is, white prejudice would lessen if whites knew more about blacks and were around them more—Halsey also explains the feelings of guilt on the part of enlightened whites toward blacks when they confront their own prejudices: “The Caucasian is a startled and uncomfortable citizen the first time he discovers that equality is not automatic, but has to be learned.”
Halsey herself is not immune to these feelings, either. She admits to her own initial discomfort in dealing with blacks as equals: “Freedom from prejudice is one thing in theory and quite another in actual practice. …it is impossible for white people who have been accustomed to Negroes only in menial roles to be entirely at ease when they first start meeting educated Negroes on a footing of equality. All the good will in the world will not keep one’s eye from bouncing off the dark skin or one’s mind from forming the breathless thought, ‘I’m talking to a Negro.’”
Halsey provides examples of her own awkwardness in attempting to get to know blacks and offers an anecdote about the first time she ever invited a black person to her home: “She [was] a pretty girl, and of a most engaging color, but I was not entirely comfortable when I walked down the street with her…I was afraid that some hot-eyed Confederate would leap out from behind a lamppost and start denouncing me—in which case I knew that my reply would not measure up to the Gettysburg Address.” This tone remains consistent throughout the book, humorous and yet oddly distancing. One must keep in mind that she is talking to whites, a specific audience, and yet there is something unsettling about the casualness of her tone. The Stage Door Canteenin New York City was one of only two canteens which served black as well as white soldiers. The no-discrimination policy at the canteen offered her a window through which to experiment with integration in a microcosmic world. Why not bring it to the rest of society, she wondered. One way that the canteen was able to avoid fights was due to a rule by the military that the servicemen had to stand at attention whenever “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played—thus, whenever a fight broke out, it was played. Halsey writes (proudly) that they only had to play the song once due to a racially-based disturbance. In a chapter entitled “Color Conscious,” Halsey begins to instruct her white audience on developing social relations with blacks—she candidly acknowledges that she does not know how blacks feel. I should mention here that, although she mentions the plight of black women in terms of their sexual exploitation at the hands of white men, Halsey clearly positions her construct of "the Negro" as male: “…no white man can, with any accuracy, claim to know the Negro until the life patterns of the two groups are considerably close than they are now. White people who say they ‘understand’ the Negro merely mean that they have seen a lot of Negroes around; but this does not imply a mastery of their psychology any more than living next door to Einstein implies a mastery of the theory of relativity.” This is Halsey’s main thesis—that integration will breed acceptance and equality. In her 1977 autobiography, No Laughing Matter: The Autobiography of a WASP, Halsey notes that NAACP chapters all over the United States bought up scores of copies of Colorblind upon publication. Some bookstores in the South refused to sell it, and it was removed from the shelves of libraries on the charge that it was obscene. Colorblind is a fascinating and funny period piece, with Cold War anxieties present in numerous references to the atomic era, although it is clear that the ticking bomb Halsey feels more likely to explode, and which she seeks to disarm through humor, is a racial one. I will post more on Margaret Halsey after my conference presentation in November.
Recruitment poster for the Massachusetts 54th Regiment
Herewith the conclusion of my focus on Louisa May Alcott's "My Contraband." Faith locks Robert in his room, then returns to her own room and flings open her window to get some fresh air. At dawn, as she completes the rest of her shift, and hears the doctor, in whom she has confided Robert’s story, enter Robert’s room. Instead of resting herself when she finally returns to her own room, Faith is unable to sleep; instead, she lies awake, pining over Robert for at least an hour, but not able to hear anything more than a murmur, one time punctuated by Robert’s heavy sobs. The doctor comes to her door to let her know that arrangements have been made for Robert to be taken north to Massachusetts.
Faith continues to work the entire next day, hoping to get a glimpse of Robert. She claims that what has happened to Lucy is what is filling her mind with anxiety, but this rings false—she is really only concerned about Robert: “I tried to rest,” she writes, adding that the “thought of poor Lucy [was] tugging at my heart,” but her true feelings are revealed by her next words: “[I] was soon back at my post again, anxiously hoping that my contraband had not been too hastily spirited away.” She now refers to Robert as her possession—she has, in a sense, now come into full emotional ownership of him, and refers to him as “my contraband” at several points as the story moves toward its conclusion.
Faith gives him money to go North, promising that “…when I come home to Massachusetts, we’ll meet in a happier place than this.” Curiously, there is no mention of Lucy in their goodbyes. Faith also gives Robert a small bible, the cover of which contains an illustration of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, upon which he comments, “I never saw my baby, Missis.” Robert’s final words suggest that he and Lucy had a child who was taken from them and sold into slavery. Faith is suddenly overcome by emotion, her eyes fill with tears, which blur her vision so much that she does not see Robert leave. Her other senses take over: “…I felt the touch of lips upon my hands, heard the sound of departing feet, and knew my contraband was gone.”
Robert’s statement about his baby appears to shake Faith out of her romantic reverie, for she then goes to confront Ned about Lucy’s whereabouts with renewed conviction. Ned admits that Lucy killed herself when Robert was sold down the river. Faith sends the bad news to Robert, who replies to her letter with one of his own, telling her that he is glad that Lucy is beyond pain. Robert then informs Faith that he will now fight for her (Faith), until he is killed. He ends up joining the Massachusetts 54th regiment and is present at the July, 1863 battle of Fort Wagner in South Carolina.
Here, Alcott departs from the fictional narrative to acknowledge the contributions of blacks to the war effort by providing details about the bravery of the black soldiers during the calamitous attack on Fort Wagner. This odd departure might feel out of place to contemporary readers, but Alcott’s nineteenth century audience (including with the real-life troops who were reading her stories while recovering in Union hospitals) would have understood her desire to rally their continued support during the darkest days of the Civil War—the death toll from the three costliest engagements of 1863 (the Battles of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga) was in excess of 54,000 on the Union side alone.
During the battle, Robert meets up with Ned, who has recovered fully from his wounds, been exchanged (as a prisoner of war) for a Union officer, and is once again fighting for the Confederacy. Robert, however, is mortally wounded by Ned this time. He is brought back to the hospital and Faith discovers that he has taken her last name, “Dane,” as his own. Robert has unwittingly initiated the miscegenetic impulse by taking Faith’s name. This interracial “marriage,” however, cannot be consummated, as Robert lies near death, so Faith’s earlier desire for him, emblematic of what Laura Hinton has termed “the perverse gaze of sympathy” (with Robert still the object of Faith’s gaze), is again transformed, this time into a maternal longing. Faith’s sexual instincts are finally repressed by her maternal ones.
She listens as one of Robert’s black comrades tells her of Robert’s fateful altercation with his half-brother. The soldier attests to Robert’s rash, almost suicidal bravery as he rushes recklessly toward his doom. In this passage, Alcott highlights the male bonding between the black soldiers, viewing the tenderness with which Robert’s fellow soldier fans him as he lay dying as a sign of higher masculine bravery. Alcott also notes the special viciousness of the Confederate soldiers toward black soldiers, who “…scalp, slash, an’ cut our ears off, when they git us,” as the soldier tells Faith. He goes on to explain that Ned ran his sword through Robert, wounding him, and that he himself killed Ned and brought Robert to the hospital to die. Faith is relieved that Robert did not end up as the one who killed Ned, although it seems curious (to me, at least) that she is able to separate his hell-bent determination to kill his brother from his inability to do so, as if he were not placing his soul in danger merely through sinful intent.
Faith turns to Robert, who has finally awakened. Her sense of loss is apparent in her passionate description of his last moments as she is once again drawn to his sad, doomed countenance:
…Robert’s eyes met mine—those melancholy eyes, so full of an intelligence that proved he had heard, remembered, and reflected…He knew me, yet gave no greeting; was glad to see a woman’s face, yet had no smile wherewith to welcome it; …he was too far across the river to return or linger now; departing thought, strength, breath, were spent in one grateful look…. His lips moved, and, bending to them, a whisper chilled my cheek….
This is as close as Faith comes to actually kissing Robert (who dies moments later), as Alcott abruptly retreats from the intimacy of the moment as well as from the visual image of Faith’s face bent closely over Robert’s. Alcott’s readers, who may have been comfortable with nurses tending to dying men, might have recoiled from the graphic image of a white woman’s lips suspended over those of a black slave, no matter how visibly white he may have looked. However, the scene feels unsatisfying to my modern sensibility as it suddenly shifts from the temporal world to visions of a great hereafter: “…in the drawing of a breath my contraband found wife and home, eternal liberty and God.” In addition, even a hint that the love of a white woman might be the prize for the courageous fighting troops of the black regiments would have added more fuel to the already inflamed debate that was about to be transformed by the “Miscegenation” pamphlet, which appeared less than a month after “My Contraband” was published. Alcott’s attempts at black subjectivity fall somewhat short, as she is never able to really get inside Robert’s mind and motives.
In this story, as well as in Alcott’s other antislavery works, the black body remained a site of erotic fascination. Her desire to show a positive interracial relationship had come earlier in the year, with the January 1863 publication of “M.L.,” but the depiction of Paul and Claudia’s love in that story was quite chaste compared to what I am suggesting in the subtext of “My Contraband.” Her 1864 story, “An Hour,” also featured interracial romance (between a white slave owner and a mulatto slave) in the midst of a planned insurrection. Nevertheless, she is to be lauded for her progressive, if at times problematic, attempts to illustrate African American humanity and to interrogate racial discourses of the nineteenth century through her fiction.
I hope you have enjoyed this look at Louisa May Alcott--I highly recommend Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography last year (2008). Matteson teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY.
Washington, D.C.'s Union Hotel Hospital (setting for Alcott's Hospital Sketches), ca. 1863.
I ended Part One of this post with Faith Dane’s reaction to Robert’s scarred face: “...pain so distorted, and the cruel sabre-cut so marred that portion of his face, that, when I saw it, I felt as if a fine medal had been suddenly reversed, showing me a far more striking type of human suffering and wrong than Michel Angelo’s bronze prisoner.” In L.M. Alcott: Signature of Reform, biographer Madeleine B. Stern describes Alcott witnessing the return of fugitive slave Anthony Burns to his owner in Boston in 1854, under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850: “As she stood on Boston’s Court Square, Alcott saw the houses draped in black, the crowds on the sidewalk hissing the troops, the flags waving Union down. For a moment she caught a glimpse of the fugitive’s face, scarred by a burn or a brand.She would not forget the rendition of Anthony Burns, or his scar.” Stern notes the importance of Burns’s scar in Alcott’s antislavery fiction. It is worth mentioning here that physical scars figure prominently in all three of Alcott’s antislavery stories, although in “My Contraband,” Robert’s physical scar does not cut as deeply as the psychic scars that wound him. Mutilations, both physical and psychic, are among the most debilitating legacies of slavery as portrayed in Alcott’s work.
Faith remains fascinated by Robert’s odd behavior, and curious about why he has been behaving so strangely with the sick Confederate prisoner, Ned, who lies gravely ill in the hospital bed. The strong gothic elements of the story are dramatically brought to the forefront in a scene where Faith has overslept while on night duty. She is in an isolated wing of the hospital late one night with Robert and Ned, and when the clock ominously strikes three (a.m.), she awakens:
I sprang up to see what harm my long oblivion had done. A strong hand put me back into my seat, and it held me there. It was Robert. The instant my eye met his my heart began to beat, and all along my nerves tingled that electric flash which foretells a danger that we cannot see. He was very pale, his mouth grim, and both eyes full of sombre fire; for even the wounded one was open now, all the more sinister for the deep scar above and below.”
Robert confesses that he has thrown out Ned’s medicine. The next passage reads as feverishly erotic, as if Faith is expecting something more—slightly sinister, but sexually charged: “I saw murder in his eyes, and turned faint with fear; yet the fear excited me, and, hardly knowing what I did, I seized the hands that had seized me.” Faith implores Robert not to kill Ned, asking him why he would want to commit such a horrific crime. Robert then reveals that Ned is his former master as well as his half-brother, and he is ready to kill Ned for raping his wife, Lucy. Robert has locked Faith in the room so that she can neither minister to Ned nor call for help.
“My wife—he took her—” Robert says haltingly.Robert’s double tragedy—being a product of miscegenation (his slave mother was raped by his father) and knowing of his wife’s rape by Ned—results in his mad compulsion to seek vengeance. He typifies the gothic antihero—doomed, dismal, and tenebrous.
In contradistinction to the rampant nineteenth-century stereotype of the “loose” black woman as a cause of white degeneracy, Alcott places the blame for Robert’s twin tragedies (mentioned above) squarely on the shoulders of white southern men, whose hypocrisy left black women even more vulnerable to exploitation. “In that instant,” writes Faith, “every thought of fear was swallowed up in burning indignation for the wrong, and a perfect passion of pity for the desperate man so tempted to avenge an injury for which there seemed no redress but this.”
Faith’s sympathies are conflicted—she cannot allow Robert to commit the murder, and yet she understands his reasons for wanting to do so. His claim to full humanity is tied up in avenging his wife’s degradation. The expression of manhood that killing Ned would provide to Robert is very important, Alcott appears to suggest. The underlying eroticism of the story moves to the surface in this scene, as Faith listens to Robert’s lurid family history while tendering caressing his hair: “[I] put my hand on his poor head, wounded, homeless, bowed down with grief for which I had no cure, and softly smoothed the long, neglected hair, pitifully wondering the while where was the wife who must have loved this tender-hearted man so well.”
Faith’s sympathy for him as she listens is palpable, and yet suffused with eroticism. She is “hot with helpless pain and passion,” and her description of Robert’s anger and indignation also reads, curiously, as erotic: “How the man’s outraged heart sent the blood flaming up into his face and deepened the tones of his impetuous voice, as he stretched his arm across the bed.” Robert then reveals that he was whipped mercilessly by the master’s family and sold further down the river. The preciseness of Alcott’s diction when Robert exposes his scarred back to Faith is telling: “With a sudden wrench he tore the shirt from neck to waist, and on his strong brown shoulders showed me furrows deeply ploughed, wounds which, though healed, were ghastlier to me than any in that house.” His virility and concomitant suffering are so magnified in her eyes that she practically swoons as she gazes upon his naked back, and becomes momentarily speechless.
Andrea Henderson has commented on the controlling gaze of the “sympathetic spectator,” who, she states, “…masochistically suffers at the sight of the object of sympathy, but the spectator also enjoys a feeling of separation from, and even control over, that object.” Faith’s gaze has been suddenly transformed by what she sees, and she attempts to gain control over Robert through a convergence of extreme sympathy and superior language skills.
Robert stands with his hands wrapped around his barely conscious brother’s throat, ready to squeeze the life out of him as Faith attempts to talk him out of his murderous intent. She manages to regain her composure and begs Robert not to kill Ned, noting that her tongue and her sympathy are her strongest weapons: “words burned on my lips, tears streamed from my eyes, and some good angel prompted me to use the one name that had power to arrest my hearer’s hand and touch his heart.” The name, of course, is that of Lucy, Robert’s wife. The control Faith exerts over Robert through her religious importuning begins to calm him—he asks whether God will bring Lucy back to him if he lets Ned live. Faith replies, “As surely as there is a Lord, you will find her here or in the beautiful hereafter, where there is not black or white, no master and no slave.” This entreaty comes directly from Paul’s letter to the Galatians 3:28, which many abolitionists quoted as a Biblical condemnation of slavery: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The religious tone of Faith’s narration, as well as her entreaties and supplications, tie Alcott to other abolitionist women writers of the 19th century. Alcott scholar Sarah Elbert notes that both Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe “believed that spiritual conversion of the heart (sentiment) is the real vehicle of historical social change. The redemptive power of women, who were entrusted with the hearts and homes of the nation, was therefore limitless, as least in literature by women for women readers.”
Faith’s appeal continues as she tells Robert that she is filled with pity and hope and a desire to help him, works, and she leads him back to his room. Here we get more of Faith’s impassioned writing—she will give Lucy back to him—she will “move heaven and earth.” “Thank Heaven for the immortality of love,” Faith writes, presumably about Robert’s enduring love for Lucy. It is not, however, too difficult to substitute Lucy with Faith herself—I read the tenderness with which she cares for Robert as somewhat suggestive here: “…when all other means of salvation failed, a spark of this vital fire softened the man’s iron will, until a woman’s hand could bend it. He let me take from him the key, let me draw him gently away, and lead him to the solitude which now was the most healing balm I could bestow.”
Faith observes Robert intently, commenting that “he fell down on his bed, and lay there, as if spent with the sharpest conflict of his life.” One might read Faith’s actions as more than just plain compassion, especially keeping in mind the earlier discussion of her controlling gaze and Robert’s respondent passiveness.
There's more to this story--I will post my concluding thoughts on Sunday evening, also providing a teaser on Alcott's next story, a sultry, steamy interracial romance set in the midst of a planned slave insurrection--the author of Little Women--who knew?
