Deposing the Man of the House: Terry McMillan Rewrites the Family

Abstract

In Terry McMillan's first novel, Mama, Mildred's husband is holding fiercely to his notion of being man of house within nuclear family: Crook...found his thick brown leather belt.... Then he made her drop her coat next to it, then her cream knit dress, and then her girdle. When all she had on was her brassiere and panties, he shoved her into bedroom where she crawled to a corner of bed. Crook kicked door shut and kids cracked theirs. Then they heard their mama screaming and their daddy hollering and whap of belt as he struck her. Didn't I tell you you was getting too grown? Whap. Don't you know your place yet girl? Whap. (7-8) I juxtapose this disturbing scenario with following from Jean Bethke Elshtain's Power Trips and Other Journeys in which she writes of society's need for re-instatement of conventional nuclear family values: Familial authority...is...part of constitutive background required for survival and flourishing of democracy. Family relations could not exist without family authority, and these relations remain best we know anything about to create human beings with a developed capacity to give ethical allegiance to background presumptions and principles of democratic society. (54) This is not from a Pat Roberson supporter. Elshtain, who explicitly identifies herself as a feminist (xiii), makes a case for the family--a specific household arrangement of mother, father, and children. She is talking about traditional, mainstream family values--firm, unchanging entities--as means to secure democracy. Ironically, her stance puts her in camp of socially conservative right, those who cheered George Bush when he maintained that we need a nation closer to The Waltons, who applauded Dan Quayle's condemnation of Murphy Brown as a single parent, and who want Legal Defense Fund abolished because it helps poor women get divorces. McMillan, however, resists following script written by mainstream American discourse that imposes cultural ideals of White patriarchal domesticity across borders of race, class, ethnicity, and sexual preference. In her first three novels, Mama (1987), Disappearing Acts (1989), and Waiting to Exhale (1992), this hegemonic discourse is reconfigured, and her families look nothing like Waltons. Despite Bush's endorsement, Waltons represent a damaging American myth, one that idealizes patriarchal family as necessary configuration for emotional security and psychological health, sine qua non for a smoothly functioning, moral democracy. As this myth denies racial, ethnic, and class diversity, it encourages debilitating feelings of guilt, betrayal, and rage, since both minority and mainstream American families often cannot or refuse to conform to myth's prescriptive ideological values. The monolithic family values Waltons represented in 1970s were reinscribed in 1980s by Cosbys, another idealized, intact family with professional parents whose first priority was always their well-dressed, Waltonized children. McMillan's polemical novels reject dominant patriarchal family values reinforced by Waltons and Cosbys and propounded by Christian right. However, such values are an historical arrangement, a construct that is neither natural, biological, or `functional' in a timeless way (Thorne 4), nor, indeed, descriptive of majority of families in this country. McMillan's fiction promotes alternatives to dominant by reconfiguring family arrangements--what they are and what they might become. Her work is important because it depicts Black family life outside norms idealized by White middle class. Furthermore, she refuses to define Black family as a pathological unit that can do nothing more than sustain conditions of its oppression. …