Same Path, Different Purpose: Chopin’s La Folle and Welty's Phoenix Jackson

Abstract

In her collection of lectures entitled Playing in the Dark (1992),Toni Morrison argues that "[t]he ways in which artists-and thesociety that bred them-transferred internal conflicts to a 'blankdarkness,' to conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies,is a major theme in American literature" (38). Among otherinstances, Morrison catalogs works by Cather, Hemingway, andPoe as examples of this transference. Black characters in Americanliterature are not simply studies in blackness, however. Instead,by examining these examples of writing black (i.e., whiteauthors creating black characters) we can learn, surprisingly, agreat deal about whiteness, Morrison suggests. Additionally, thereis a good deal we can learn about the authors. To wit, Morrison'sconcern is for "how Africanist personae, narrative, and idiommoved and enriched the text in self-conscious ways, to considerwhat the engagement meant for the work of the writer's imagination"(16). For my purposes, such an undertaking of looking at theartwork and assessing its reflection of the artist seems quite rich,especially when we consider the undeniably loaded issue of race.