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

Abstract

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