Writing the Grotesque in Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones"

Katerina Psilopoulou

doi:10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424

Abstract

In her work, Jesmyn Ward has revitalized the Southern Gothic tradition and its tropes to better reflect the realities of Black American life in the 21st century. This essay explores the reconfiguration of the grotesque body in Ward's sophomore novel, Salvage the Bones, which follows an impoverished Black family in Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. In contrast to her literary predecessors, Ward defines the grotesque as a state of debility imposed on Black bodies and then deemed uniquely problematic to them as a class and race, rather than the result of centuries of structural oppression. As such, she understands the trope as encompassing far more than bodily or intellectual difference, the way in which it was previously utilized by Southern writers like William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. Instead, Ward theorizes the grotesque as a biopolitical state, in which populations that do not conform to the status quo, and specifically the dominant capitalist mode of production and consumption, are driven to the margins and their lives deemed expendable.

Highlights

In recent years, amidst the turmoil of the Black Lives Matter protests spurred by the killings of unarmed Black Americans by police, a new literary and cultural phenomenon has been on the rise
The new African American Gothic is a school that engages with the legacy of American slavery and racism, while at the same time linking it to the present and to the precariousness of Black American lives
Her work has contributed to the development of the new African American Gothic by reviving the modes of the socalled Southern Gothic, a tradition preoccupied with the “haunted” South and its legacy of slavery and Jim Crow

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Amidst the turmoil of the Black Lives Matter protests spurred by the killings of unarmed Black Americans by police, a new literary and cultural phenomenon has been on the rise. A native Mississippian, in her oeuvre Ward seeks to historicize the Southern Gothic, revising its tropes to expose the continuing haunting of the present by past racial prejudice, discrimination and violence She revitalizes the genre while pioneering a new school of writing that shifts the focus from White subjects to the ongoing Gothicism of Black existence and the precariousness of Black lives in America. This essay explores one aspect of this revisionist project by examining how Ward repurposes the familiar Southern Gothic trope of the grotesque body in her novel Salvage the Bones (2011) In contrast to her literary predecessors, Ward defines the grotesque as a state of debility imposed on Black bodies and deemed uniquely problematic to them as a class and race, rather than the result of centuries of structural oppression. The language and imagery of the Grotesque, Ward modernizes the trope to better reflect the reality of contemporary Black American life in the South and the ways in which it remains subject to disenfranchisement and othering along both racial and economic lines

THE GOTHIC AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH

THE GROTESQUE BODY

DEBILITY AND BARE LIFE AS THE MODERN GROTESQUE

GROTESQUE MOTHERHOOD IN SALVAGE THE BONES

CONCLUSIONS