Marketable Bodies, Possessive Peacocks, and Text as Excess: Edwards-Yearwood's In the Shadow of the Peacock

Abstract

In a recent article, Henry Louis Gates suggests that the multiple, shifting divisions of power portrayed in black women's fiction defy categorization by current white feminist theories of patriarchy. After criticizing these theories for defining male and female identities according to the static binarism of oppressor and oppressed, Gates argues that part of what distinguishes black women's fiction in the contemporary scene is a sense of a historical community and its particularities, sometimes antic, sometimes grim, but never quite reducible to a masterplot of victim and victimizer. At their best, these texts are porous to history and propose an articulation of power that is more decentered and nuanced than most of us are accustomed to. (617) One recent African-American novel which successfully captures the intricate powerplay in intersexual relationships against a backdrop of historical flux is Grace EdwardsYearwood's In the Shadow of the Peacock. Through the coming-of-age story of Celia, a young black woman growing up in a Harlem community struggling with race riots, the civil rights movement, and the aftermath of the Vietnam war, the novel enacts a subtle yet significant departure from the narratives of sexual oppression (Gates 617) constructed by white feminists and critiqued by Gates. Nevertheless, this departure can be seen as the result of a complex dialogue Edwards-Yearwood's novel has with the market models of patriarchy which generate these master narratives. Largely developed by white feminists, market models of patriarchy suggest that the production and maintenance of dominant discourses on gender involve a mapping out of male homosocial' relationships across and through female bodies in a manner that virtually precludes the possibility of female subjectiv