Suicide or Messianic Self-Sacrifice?: Exhuming Willa's Body in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills

Abstract

Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. (bell hooks, yearning) Since joining the burgeoning canon of contemporary Black women's fiction, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1985) has generated much critical discussion not only for its associations with Dante [1] but also its damning depiction of the Black bourgeoisie. [2] However, while scholars have read the novel along these and other lines, and also identified its heroine Willa Prescott-Nedeed as playing various narrative roles, from being a feminist critic [3] and historian [4] to serving as a triumphant heroine, [5] they have virtually overlooked the novel's concern with theology, particularly its advancing of a gendered version of millennialism/messianism in the context of Black liberation experience. Relatedly, the suggestion that Willa's death is self-destruction (Goddu 225) and, more specifically, a quick (Homans 396, 398) raises a problematic that complicates the critical lapse. Deemphasizing the novel's biblical undercurrent, this very suggestion seems to question and indirectly condemn the kind of communit y and Black-female subjectivity which Naylor, herself a feminist, proffers in the text. Naylor's artistic interest in both the rescue of a transgressed (Black) world, Linden Hills, from Luther's satanic dispensation designed to last a millennium, and the need for a new (fictive) world order, created and symbolized in Mama Day, her next novel, magnifies the salvific functionality of Willa's character. It also locates Linden Hills' controversial resolution in the floor plan of Naylor's oeuvre. Naylor's handling of millennialism/messianism encases and also extends the treatment of theodicy in African American (women's) writings. Black womanist/feminist theologians such as Renita Weems, Kelley Brown Douglas, and Jacquelyn Grant [6] have, for instance, engaged the place of scripture relative to Black women's experience of race, sex, and class oppression. Also, on a creative level, ntozake shange's for colored girls and, especially, Alice Walker's The Color Purple address not merely the issue of God or of an otherworldly confidant in relation to Black/women's lives, but more so the idea of women rallying and intervening as radical messiahs to save other women, and men as well. Viewing Linden Hills through the lens of this tradition, the question arises as to whether Willa's death, which occurs during her consequential battle against Luther, is indeed suicidal/self-destructive. This question is far more than a linguistic squabble, for although Naylor's narrator does not classify Willa's death as a coroner might, it does matter how scholarship checks her death certificate. Black-female suicides may be infrequent statistically, but they do occur in Black women's fiction (Laurel Dumont, for example, kills herself in Naylor's novel). The question matters because the strong connotations of either descriptor, suicide or self-destruction, have interpretive ramifications both for the text's feminist thought and for the larger, religious/messianic meanings of Willa's death. Speaking broadly, what is really at stake here is the issue of how society in general, and the discourse on Black liberation struggle, specifically, (mis)represents Black women's lives, forcing us, sometimes, to dig up the dead--critically. Two fundamental and inextricable goals guide this critical autopsy. One, I attempt to address and amend what I perceive to be problematic readings of Willa, specifically the suggestion that her death is both negative and futile. Two, building on that revision, I consider the novel's ignored engagement of theology and thereby suggest a different look at both Willa and the narrative. Drawing on the novel's religious overtones, and reading Linden Hills as a text which harnesses and signifies [7] upon the Messianic themes of coming social liberation and redemption grounded in Black culture (Howard-Pitney 12), I read Willa as an irregular messiah--as a gendered reification of both Moses and Christ. …