The peculiar sisterhood : Black and White women of the Old South in American literature

In Faulkner's Absalom. Absalom! Clytie Sutpen's touch becomes in Rosa Coldfield's memory an encounter of the flesh which binds the two women in one electrifying moment of human connection. It is this volatile, often violent connection between Black and White women in the nineteenth-century South which this study explores in selected American fiction and autobiography. In its deep ambiguities and bitter conflicts, the relationship between Black and White women may be seen as paradigmatic of the Southern racial experience—its antipathy and guilt on the one hand; its very real bonding through common suffering on the other. Cross-racial female relationships in two nineteenth-century novels, seven autobiographies of Southern women, and three modern novels show that tensions of race, gender and region explored simultaneously create new contexts which illuminate American literature.

As shown in Chapter I, the feminist subtexts of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis's Cabin are based on the presumption of White superiority and exist in polemic fictions that sentimentalize relationships of Black and White women of the slavocracy. The autobiographical writings of these women, discussed in Chapter II, reflect that real world of human bondage as fraught with sexual jealousy and mutual distrust. The novels examined in the last three chapters explore White blindness and the assertion of Black will in the face of that blindness. Rosa's response to Clytie becomes Faulkner's metaphor for the mysterious power of racism which supplants human kinship with terror and antipathy. In Sapphira and the Slave Girl Willa Gather also renders Sapphira Colbert's cruelty to her slave Nancy as a case study of the evil use of power. In Margaret Walker's Jubilee the Black heroine Vyry Ware nurtures White women, forgives her evil mistress, and articulates Walker's "humanistic values."

The mistress-slave woman relationship casts a long shadow in the American female consciousness. Today's cross-racial female relationships—and their reflections in our literature—are explosive remnants of a twisted past. Yet in that past are the threads of new insights into the thick web of connections between race, gender, and power in American culture and literature.