Introduction
“According to the
newspapers, the convention had been “an open violation of common decency-the
association of black and white-male and female.”
Holly Jackson, on the
Pennsylvania Hall Fire of 1838.
A
dialectical Hegelian thought process is at the center of Dubois’ The Souls
of Black Folk- the integration of opposites, the liminal space between
polarities. The eventful moment in 1838
was the culmination of the resistance to the quelling of polarities that had
been happening in American political and cultural life: the grand lecture hall in Philadelphia was
burned to the ground. Abolitionists had raised funds to build the building, and
a convention of antislavery women was held there and even despite threats, “the
women took the podium anyway.” The women had been screamed at and “white and
black women linked arms as they left the hall that night, a show of solidarity
in case the women of color were singled out for especially violent attacks.”
(Jackson 73-4) The crowd burst in later with axes and torched the building.
When firemen arrived, they saved only the surrounding buildings from the
flames. The antislavery women were blamed for the danger and the destruction in
the end. An article in the Philadelphia Gazette “celebrates the firemen
for sharing the feelings of the crowd and not allowing one drop of water to
fall on the burning building.” (Jackson 76) The ire of the mobs was not put out
by the water. Like the fire that ripped through those buildings, the anger fed
on itself and used misplaced blame to counter their unrecognized shame. It
spread like wildfire, and violence and hatred became the core of the crowd,
meaning that it became the norm. If this norm was contested, the protestor(s)
would be shut down.
If
water had been used liberally as it should have, the polarities would have
reached the point of synthesis. Unfortunately, this did not happen that way,
and decades later would prove that this imbalance had a profound effect on how
the country would recover from the Civil War that would enfold shortly after:
North vs. South. What is important here is to note that this event had occurred
in the North. Incidentally, Frederick Douglas escaped slavery in New York in
the year 1838 (not one year later). He would subsequently be troubled by
ejection multiple times from train cars (Jim Crow car) as he insisted that it
was unfair to be forced to sit in lesser conditions due to his color. He kept
trying to forcibly quell the polarity, however.
What is it about water and liminal
“grey” spaces that feel like home to marginalized people? Why does Dubois turn
to water in his text, from the outset? Why does Edna lose herself without
struggle into the water at the end of The Awakening? The answer may lie
within what water means to us as a symbol, and perhaps it could mean that in
water we are one with our bodies. No one can “own” us there. Even those who were speaking out against
slavery could not “own” a building that they had paid for and constructed on
their own. It was left to burn even though it could have been saved. Could the
emphasis on water be part of the polarity of fire/destruction vs.
water/healing/recovery? Could Edna too have been saved by the water? Had she
herself “synthesized” the polarities present in her own life, could she have
managed to quell the hopelessness that she felt at the end of the novel?
There is a long tradition of linking
water with renewal or baptism, rebirth, and the imagination. We could also move
even further into water being the realm of the erotic. We enter into this world
through water, and we learn early on that this is a safe place full of security
and fulfillment of our needs. Aphrodite/Venus was birthed in the water. Goddess
of love and beauty came into being through the alchemy of the liquid realm. We
learn through Greek myths that it is the sirens that sing calling the sailors
into their watery world; songs also being the realm of the liquid. Water is
filled with mystery, the feminine, emotion, the unknown, nurturing, guidance,
darkness, a muffling of/escape from sound, and a letting go. If you struggle
too much in the water, you could drown. It is better to just float. Water is
both safety and danger, at once. A Hegelian dance. Water could have saved that burning building in 1838, yet
control was taken over the water, in the end, in the name of justice.
Dubois: Songs, the
Water, and Escape.
Dubois’
concept known as “double consciousness” illustrates this idea of the liminal
space. The Black slave cannot escape from the eyes watching and assessing his
actions therefore leading to his/her own self-assessment continuously,
analogous to the idea that slaves could not escape surveillance and punishment
over pretty much anything that they would do. Dubois begins his first chapter
called “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” with a song by Arthur Symons:
O
water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand,
All
night long crying with a mournful cry,
As
I lie and listen, and cannot understand
The
voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea,
O
water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I?
All
night long the water is crying to me.
Unresting
water, there shall never be rest
Till
the last moon droop and the last tide fail
And
the fire of the end begin to burn in the west,
And
the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,
All
life long crying without avail,
As
the water all night long is crying to me. (Dubois 1)
Dubois continues on to say,
“Between me and the other world, there is an unasked question: unasked by some
through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of framing it.”
They don’t ask directly, “How does it feel to be a problem?”” (Dubois 1) But
this remains unsaid and in the air as a presence through every conversation.
Dubois juxtaposes this idea with the entrance poem to show the idea of grief
that lies within the watery realm of silence. He uses an apostrophe to start
his work, and water is addressed as something that could have the capacity to
understand his feelings. The second stanza gives a clue to “why water?” because
he sees it as ever present and unending. The rhythms of water continue on
indefinitely and can be relied upon to do so. As we cry when we are sad, so
water cries in turn. So, for Dubois, to give water his sadness and grief not
only will water understand, but water will echo his sadness. He will feel the
rhythm of it, like a song, and he pairs this poem with sheet music below it. Unlike
when he has a conversation with a white person and the guilt comes up or what
is truly important (feelings) go unaddressed, so water can be relied upon to
not ignore. The act of creating music is a way through the silence. And to
address the water through a song is to make spoken this need. Emotions and
water are linked. Grief is an emotion. Sadness creates tears.
Dubois’
dominant metaphor for the entire work is that of the veil, the ever-present
partition that separates African Americans from the world around them, and in
doing so separates them from themselves as well.” (Neilson 107) Water could
also represent the only place or one of the only places that an individual can
escape this veil, as they needed to do during times of slavery. Wilderness and
swamps were typical places where slaves would congregate and evade the watching
eyes of their masters and overseers. Dubois continuously turns to the sorrow
songs in his work which could mean that he is using the songs to create a veil
between others who would not understand not only the textual connotations, but
the music. He includes sheet music in his text which not everyone would know
how to read. These songs create a shield so that they could in freedom express
themselves and commune together. “American slaves suffered an extraordinary
amount of interference in their daily lives.” (Neilson 108) They had so many
rules placed on them, some they weren’t even made aware of, so to consider how
oppressive this was, one only has to understand that any motion or sound one
makes could be scrutinized or punished leaving their indecipherable markings on
their flesh, creating “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Neilson 108). The
surveillance of the masters was similar to Foucault’s panopticon; the slaves
would not know when or if they were being watched. So, slaves were forced to
meet and engage secretly in order to evade “the eyes”:
In
many cases the slaves sang and worshipped in secret, often late at night or
very early in the morning when their masters were asleep and when the cloak of
darkness would most likely shield them from the prowling patrollers.” (Neilson
111)
So, any place where they could
find an empty spot that wasn’t being watched became their sanctuary, and this
is where slave spirituals began. In essence, these were sung in spaces that
were liminal and untouched. Virginal, safe spaces. Song was prevented from
being heard by establishing either pots of water in the center of the gathering
or wetting clothes and cloaking the space in these. The longing that they felt
was recorded in their songs, songs that would not be overheard by the wrong
party.
So,
“How does it feel to be a problem?”. The slaves would express how this feels,
and Dubois when he wrote his book made sure that using the language of slavery
and this ever-present reliable water that he would be heard. He put these songs
next to poetry from the Anglo-Saxon tradition to make this clear.
“After
the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the
Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil and gifted with second-sight
in this American world-a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but
only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” (Dubois
2)
His experience is second hand
experience. Is it any wonder that Dubois focuses on the liminal and the
dialectic of opposites in his work? Is it also any wonder that music was the
way through for many?
Dubois
did not appreciate this idea of favoring the “white” of Progress, erasing the “black”
of the ambiguous past, what is seen as unacceptable needing to be destroyed. To
Dubois, a reconciliation needs to happen, not an erasure. A combining of the
two was necessary. “My log schoolhouse
was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is
necessarily ugly.” (Dubois 43) He moves into sorrow as his narration continues,
and he emphasizes twilight and dawn as he laments these changes:
“How
shall man measure Progress there where the dark faced Josie lies? How many
heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life
to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife
and failure-is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning
day? Thus, sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car.” (Dubois 45)
Dubois enters the liminal,
ambiguous space between past and future, hope and despair, and a lack of
certainty in order to attempt to find the answers to the questions. He is
assessing what Reconstruction has done to the cause and the perception of
Blacks in society, lamenting the errors made through so much struggle and
resistance. He asks: “Well, then what for?” as an echo to ”How does it feel to
be a problem?” If they could not voice this simple phrase, or have it asked of
them, what was the war for if it would result in such uncertainty?
What
follows next in Chapter V is the metaphor of Atlanta and the idea that
all-black and
white- are rising together. This
next chapter shows us his hope, but first he must accept despair.
“It is a hard thing
to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of
empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and
yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was
vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not
dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something
of Wrong , something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and the
best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in
its excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.” (Dubois 48)
Dubois sees clearly that the
uncertainty is the result of, not the triumph of Good, but the resulting
mixture of consequence: with the good, there resulted so much bad. The polarity
of this realization is what led him to the water and the liminal. Only by
reconciling these paradoxes could he find a solution. Only by creating a voice
that both could and would be heard could they be acknowledged.
Chopin and
Aphrodite’s Rise from the Foam
Chopin’s novel The Awakening brings
us a different perspective of what water can do for us and what water means.
Does it give us our bodily ownership back, or does it take it away? Chopin
presents us with another paradox, which of course could go either way. Michelle
Burnbaum argues that Edna never regained her agency. She only allowed “alien
hands” to give her sensuality and the erotic. While maintaining a liminal
position, Edna does not acknowledge her innate power over those who she
attempts to connect with in the story. Burnbaum writes:
“Alternately
awake and asleep-sovereign and subjugated-Chopin’s heroine enacts the paradox
of the imperial self who appears to rule while being herself ruled. The
unbearable contradictions of being both free agent and yet acted upon is
characteristic of the colonizer’s position. And as the myth of
self-authorization must involve the erasure of its own authorizing principle,
so must Edna repress that which is both the basis for and a threat to her
autonomy.” (Burnbaum 303)
While Burnbaum’s argument does
have merit and would be useful when focused on the marginalized characters in
this work and their struggles, what is not acknowledged here is that the
colonized would be seeing Edna from their own perspective, not understanding “how
it feels to be her” or “How it feels to be a problem?”, not realizing that to
be in her shoes they would see that she is also marginalized and so, was
looking for a place to belong. The clue is who does she choose to cling to for
assurance and belonging? All the non-White characters. Instead of seeing her as
a colonizer using people who are below her on the social hierarchy, we could
alternatively see her as trying to disregard the unfair and superficial
hierarchy that needs to be broken up. Edna could see the truth that it is the
relationships that we foster that matter, not an imposed hierarchical structure
to give us how we are supposed to behave. What hurt Edna at the end is her
realization that her influence was not enough to change things, and would not. Her
entrance into the water was her surrender. The relationships that she had
formed were too fragile to withstand that structure of power and forced
exclusion from not only social space, but even through our own feelings and
bonds.
Sandra
Gilbert has referred to Edna as a “mythic metamorphosis” (Gilbert 55), akin to
a female Jesus:
“For
in creating a heroine as free and golden as Aphrodite, a “regal woman” who
“stands alone” and gives herself where she “pleases”, Chopin was exploring a
vein of revisionary mythology allied not only to the revisionary erotics of
free love advocates like Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman but also to the
feminist theology of women like Florence Nightingale, who believed that the
next Christ might be a “female Christ”. (Gilbert 61)
Could it be the only way out for
Edna was through death or surrender? It appears to be that way, and the
attitude towards race in this novel would only give a partial answer to this
question. She did everything right (except for leaving her children which is a
different debate and not without cause). She attempted to wrench herself away
from the structure she was confined within, the cage of the home was opened up,
and it is important to note that it was the male presence in the novel that
allowed for her rise out of confinement:
“After
Mrs. Pontellier had danced twice with her husband, once with Robert, and once
with Monsieur Ratignolle, who was thin and tall and swayed like a reed in the
wind when he danced, she went out on the gallery and seated herself on the low
window-sill, where she commanded a view of all that went on in the hall and
could look out toward the Gulf. There was a soft effulgence in the east. The
moon was coming up, and its mystic shimmer was casting a million lights across
the distant, restless water.” (Chopin 32)
In the text, this is the pivotal
and quite liminal point where she becomes Aphrodite. She “commands” the view
over everything. She has multiple men dancing with her. She shows a strong
presence over the restless water. Here we see her at her best; where she should
have remained had she been simply the figure of Aphrodite. It was her fluctuating
emotion that changed things, and the changing tide of societal attitude towards
such a strong woman, among even those women who would be most likely to
understand her dilemma. Eventually, she
reached the “point of no return”, and like a figure such as Anna Karenina, she
couldn’t come back to shore. The best way to assess what this could mean in the
scope of water imagery and the liminal is to compare it to Dubois and his use
of water as an apostrophe.
Only water understands. Water is a part of
grief and of the emotional, imaginative realm of fantasy and nostalgia for a
lost past. It doesn’t really matter if those fantasies or nostalgia had
actually existed; they are still very real in the mind of the person who is
calling them forth. The slaves found a safe space and used water to increase
the safety, and they did it communally, together. Edna is very different. She
is utterly alone, so that when she enters the water, she is not safe. She
cannot, like Aphrodite, ride the foam because she has surrendered to the water.
In a sense, Gilbert is correct when she claims Edna is a Jesus figure, but I
don’t think this goes far enough. Gilbert describes Aphrodite as:
“Naked yet immortal, she moves with ease and grace between the
natural and the super natural, the human and the inhuman, nature and culture.
Golden and decked in gold, she is associated with sunset and sunrise, the
liminal hours of transformative consciousness-the entranced hours of awakening
and drowsing-that mediate between night and day, dream and reality.” (Gilbert
62)
Dubois
also talked of twilight and dawn just the same: that liminal realm between the
polarity of opposing sides. However, he brings it up as if to say: not all is
dark and not all is light. Progress doesn’t mean embracing only the light, but
understanding the darkness and accepting it. This is something that Edna fails
to do. She wishes to go back to an untouched, virginal past of childhood in
order to not accept the darkness. If she had accepted the darkness, she would
have become the liminal Aphrodite. The goddess who has agency to change the
world of mortal men. Casting herself in the sea was certainly not goddess-like.
It may have been Jesus like, and yes, her death paves the way for the New
Woman, but it also shows her downfall.
Edna had escaped from the cage and could act in the world with freedom.
She had gained that. What she couldn’t do was accept reality.
“It was no coincidence, after all, that Kate Chopin imagined her
Venus rising from the foam of a ceremonial dinner party in 1899, the same year
that another American artist, Isadora Duncan, was beginning to dance the dances
of Aphrodite in London salons…Within a few years, Duncan, haunted by her own
birth “under the star of Aphrodite” was to sit for days before the Primavera,
the famous painting of Botticelli.” (Gilbert 63)
Edna had enthroned herself at the
dinner table in gold satin at one point in the novel, but we see this also
contrasted with scenes of drowsiness and sleep and wakefulness in a large white
bed. It is crystal clear that Edna had
become a mortal version of Aphrodite, but perhaps this is what Chopin is trying
to tell us: that Aphrodite is not mortal. Edna could lose her life. Both Dubois
and Chopin hit on something very important: how treacherous it was to live in
times like these where an entire building could be left to burn, and a woman
cast into the sea would not even be noticed. It is a forgetfulness, an
ignorance, a casting aside of those who do not belong.
The
liminal was dangerous and uncertain, but it was much preferable to the real and
the open and the light, as we see by what happened during the fire of
Philadelphia Hall. There is a long tradition of depictions of Aphrodite in the
art world, so it is striking to note that during the 1890’s we see depictions
in other forms of art. Sandro Botticelli had been forgotten about in the annals
of art history until around 1858: “intelligent artistic circles in England were
aware of Botticelli at least by 1858, when Lady Eastlake, herself almost
suspiciously a la mode in such things, warns a friend about to visit Italy to
“try and fill your heart especially with grandeur and earnestness of the great
four” quattrocento Florentine figures of whom Botticelli is first.” (Levey 295)
His art before that was seen as obscure and of lesser importance, almost odd in
appearance. But that was changing in the late 19th century. “In the
early 1860’s Burne-Jones’s own vehement love of Botticelli was still something
unusual. Nevertheless, by then the public was aware of Botticelli’s existence
and his work was being collected. (Levey 299)….But there were serious obstacles
to appreciation. There remained unexplained obscurities of subject matter and a
violence of emotion which was disturbing, even an ambivalence in the artist’s
attitude to what he painted.”(Levey 301) Is it possible that what was being
rejected was the liminal and the grey areas that his works seem to call forth?
Could this also be the reason why in the 1890’s America, we are seeing literary
works calling forth the liminal and therefore calling forth Aphrodite
subconsciously in the process? What fears us also drives us forward, and Dubois
has pinpointed that fear and the result. William Morris and William Stanhope
had both been fascinated by Venus and explored her both in their work and in
the admiration they showed for earlier works by Botticelli of Flora and Births
of Venus. It was “still a rather esoteric enthusiasm in 1870s” (Poe 56), but at
the same time when ideas and paradigms are being called forth, this is done
slowly and in a small way without knowledge until later when the trend has
almost passed. Lorenzo Medici, patron of Sandro Botticelli had wished for the
“Tuscan tongue” to become something “never again be scorned as being poorly
ornamented and lacking in richness.” (Dempsey 3), so suffice it to say that
Dubois’ use of slave songs in his work was in an analogous way attempting to
approach the same formalization in order to raise the level of the art he
wished to emphasize. One could argue that both Lorenzo de Medici and W.E.B.
Dubois were successful in their efforts, Florentine art and culture becoming
high art, and Black culture and music becoming pivotal to the growth of
American music and pop culture. And it was through the metaphorical rise of
Aphrodite and the liminal that we can track this progress happening. The
attachment and attraction to Botticelli tracks the level of change as the idea
of the New Woman and The Decadent rise from the foam to the surface. The
polarities were now realized, so the paradox could be resolved.
Conclusion: The Rise
of the New Woman and Black American Culture.
“Eros
is what moves us to make connections and therefore leads to the common good: it
is the power, the yearning, the hunger, the drive, the YES to the breakdown of
the walls that separate person from person, creature from creature, creature
from creator; and to the making of the connections between and among us in
which we find our common good,” (Hall 96)
Cheryl Hall argues convincingly
in her book The Trouble with Passion: Political Theory Beyond the Reign of
Reason that it is through the erotic that one could resist oppression.
Chopin’s novel could have been an example of this had Edna embraced the erotic
for what it is: true, singular desire for what is real and a taking ownership
of the body through these desires. However, she didn’t remain in the erotic
world. She left only to be taken in by the world of illusion and nostalgia that
the water her forced her into in the end. We could make an even further
argument by saying that it is in this novel that we see the unresolvable
paradox of desire vs. illusion, or body vs. fantasy. We wonder what would have
happened had she stayed, but that is not important considering when the work
was published and what was possible for women at the time, holding profound
significance for what was at stake toward the end of the nineteenth century. As
Linda Dowling writes:
“When
they described their lurid vision of cultural apocalypse, critics of the “New”
inevitably adopted what had become a familiar journalistic vocabulary of
crisis. Invoking the analogy of the French Revolution, for instance, had by the
1890’s become an almost reflexive rhetorical gesture among journalistic
writers, one merely signaling a writer’s urgent dismay or his sense of
inevitable, inevitably disastrous consequences. “ (Dowling 437)
Given this prevailing atmosphere
of crisis, it is no wonder that writers were writing on the line of the
liminal. When there is an upheaval in any area there is always this uncertainty
present. What we do with this uncertainty had to ability to promote change for
either the better or the worse.
“If
we smile at the repeated warnings of apocalypse made by critics of the New
Woman and the decadent, we nonetheless recognize in their apocalyptic
vocabulary a genuinely anguished expression of cultural anxiety, a sense that
the new might betoken cultural changes even less comprehensible than those
which the constantly recurring images of decline, decay, and end were meant to
control.” (Dowling 438)
In other words, they were seeing
it as a sign that things were about to go downhill very fast. Linda Dowling
also brings up in her essay how those heroines of the New Woman Movement
consorted with those of the “other “unsavory lower classes”: lower class people
and especially the male of the lower classes. Not only did they want to rewrite
social imbalances through their cause, but usually this descent was appealing
because it represented the simplicity that they cannot re-gain in their lives
(just as Edna fantasized about going back to her childhood in her last moments),
temporary and was only a brief stint on the journey towards greater sense of
self. (Dowling 442-3) What Dowling does
not address, however, is the idea that through the melding of class, this New
Woman could create a new category for herself without throwing out what was
good in the old system. Not only that, women were able to achieve the sense of
the erotic that they could not achieve within high culture and its overly
formal system of restrictions. In essence, by creating these connections they
were attempting to do what Edna had begun: transgress the unbroken liminality
of the age: to finally break the system
that was not working without causing destruction in the process.
Isn’t
that in essence what Dubois was also attempting in his Souls of Black Folk? “How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a
bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and
real!” Why should we forget where we
come from (nature, home, roots, the pastoral) through the univocal cause of
Progress? That paradox needed to be resolved. Forgetting half of the polarity
would be exactly what would lead to despair and eventual destruction. Dubois
taught us that. So did Chopin. We cannot embrace only one side of a duality, so
we either stay within the liminal or combine the two together to create
something completely brand new.
As
Dubois had combined two sides throughout his work (music vs. poems, and moments
of simplicity vs. higher thought/reason), so did American culture continue on
to resolve those paradoxes presented to us in the 1890’s: African Americans
would continue into the future to change the landscape of music through song,
stories, and spirituality, and women would rise like Aphrodite to give strength
to a whole new generation of women with voices that demanded to be heard and
accepted as part of the whole.
Both
Black Americans and American women had reclaimed their bodies in the end and
would write their own language into the integral American story of the future.
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