Gloria Naylor's "Linden Hills": A Modern "Inferno"

Abstract

Gloria Naylor's second novel, Linden Hills,' is a modern version of Dante's Inferno in which souls are damned not because they have offended God or have violated a religious system but because they have offended themselves. In their single-minded pursuit of upward mobility, the inhabitants of Linden Hills, a black, middle-class suburb, have turned away from their past and from their deepest sense of who they are. Naylor feels that the subject of who-we-are and what we are willing to give up of who-we-are to get where-we-want-to-go is a question of the highest seriousness as serious as a Christian's concern over his salvation. Naylor could not have chosen a more suitable framework for Linden Hills than Dante's Inferno. The Dantean model emphasizes the novel's serious moral tone and gives a universalizing mythic dimension to what otherwise might be considered a narrow subject, the price American blacks are paying for their economic and social success. An interest in Dante is a well-established tradition in American letters.2 The Divine Comedy has been translated and edited by such diverse poets as Longfellow and John Ciardi, and it has been analyzed by American critics from James Russell Lowell to T. S. Eliot. Dantean echoes, allusions, and inversions occur in the works of novelists from Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Hawkes and of writers as various as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones), and