Linden Hills Research Articles

A Prayer for Mourning: Seduction and Trauma in Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie

A Prayer for Mourning:Seduction and Trauma in Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie Jessica Forbes Roberts (bio) Let there be veils. Let there be protections and escapes from the knowledge we are condemned to work so hard at discovering. Carolivia Herron, Thereafter Johnnie The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming" The 1991 publication of Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie found praise in both academic and nonacademic circles. The New York Times Book Review asserts that her "fascinating and highly original first novel belongs in the distinguished company of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gloria Naylor's wickedly satirical Linden Hills" (Bierhorst 16). The critic for the New Statesman writes that Herron's "incandescent and visionary prose-poetry is capable, like a divinely wrought gospel song, of raising the hairs on the back of your neck or moving you to tears" (Stuart 41). Henry Louis Gates calls the novel a "remarkable achievement" and Herron "the fourth Fury" (dust jacket). Barbara Christian opens her review for the Women's Review of Books with the pronouncement, "I am dazzled, literally, by the intense light of Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie" (Christian, "Epic" 6).1 And yet in the thirteen years since its publication, Thereafter Johnnie has received surprisingly little critical attention.2 But perhaps the lack of critical attention should not be so surprising. In addition to praising Herron's novel in her review, Christian also anticipates that feminists, an audience to which the novel could be expected to appeal, might find it disturbing, not because of "the theme of incest per se" but because of her method of presentation: [Herron] does not present father/daughter incest, as Alice Walker does in The Color Purple, as a powerful father figure's brutal assault upon a helpless girl-child, or as Toni Morrison does in The Bluest Eye, as a powerless father's sense that sexual love is all he can give his wounded daughter. In Thereafter Johnnie both father [End Page 1060] and daughter seduce each other, so that it is difficult to distinguish between "who was the possessor, and who was the possessed." And Herron writes of their sexual intercourse in a language so erotic it approaches the divine. (6) Herron's erotic descriptions of incest are, indeed, disturbing not only because both father and daughter draw pleasure and pain from the incestuous acts but also because the language of these passages threatens to inflict both pleasure and pain on the reader as well. But whether the novel has disturbed feminists or other audiences, for that matter, is unclear because so few scholars have responded to it in writing. Christian's comment seems to imply that feminists are more likely than others to be disturbed because Herron chooses to make the seduction mutual and, therefore, to represent Patricia as actively seducing her father. In doing so, Herron risks casting Patricia as the Seductive Daughter, "one of the two major culprits in the incest romance" (Herman 36), thereby enabling readings that relieve the incestuous father of both responsibility and blame. I would argue, however, that while the characters seem to accept both this explanation for incest and the myths that support it, the novel does not. By having her characters (almost compulsively) interpret Patricia and John Christopher's relationship, Herron anticipates the various discourses readers invoke in order to deal with narratives of incest—those of victimization, morality, and psychology—and reveals them to be inadequate. Rather than champion a version of Freud's feminine Oedipus complex or what Jung called the Electra complex, Thereafter Johnnie reveals how Freud's revised ideas about infant abuse have offered its readers a way out of the complexities of the novel. In this essay, I will use theories of narrative and traumatic memory to explore Herron's feminist critique of the Seductive Daughter and of the Western mythologies and twentieth-century interpretive frameworks that have been used to protect the "Poor Father." The...

Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion

Series Foreword by Kathleen Gregory Klein The Life of Gloria Naylor Literary Heritage The Women of Brewster Place (1982) Linden Hills (1985) Mama Day (1988) Bailey's Cafe (1992) The Men of Brewster Place (1998) Bibliography Index

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

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. …

That Dangerous Figure: Charles Lamb and the Critics by Joseph E. Riehl Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide by Michael O'Neill (review)

TES,31, 200 TES,31, 200 The tension slackens slightly in the next section, on 'Victorian Evaluations'. Alison Milbank, author of a promising DanteandtheVictorians, chooses as her topic the poetical and critical fortune of the Paolo and Francescaepisode: after a very good opening comparison with AnnaKarenina and the outline of an interestingplot to come, however, her article (on 'Dante and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy') becomes fragmentary. From Ralph Pite, who published a stimulating book, The Circleof OurVision: Dante'sPresence in EnglishRomantic Poetry, one might expect an incisive essay on, say, Tennyson. Instead, we get a well-constructed and argued piece on a less fascinatingtopic, E. H. Plumptre'stranslationof Dante as a mirror of Victorian 'Faith', i.e., of nineteenth-century attitudes to religious and cultural doubt. In Part iv, 'Modern Revisions', the stage is taken by Pound, MacNeice, and Beckett. Matthew Reynolds's contribution on the first of these is elegant; Steve Ellis's on MacNeice's Autumn Sequeloriginal; Hugh Haughton's on (late) Beckett pleasantly surprising.The picture the three together offer of Dante's afterlife in Modernism, oscillating as it does between quotation, form, and existential perspective,suggeststhereis stilla lot of workto be done on the subject. Part vi opens with Nick Havely's agile and perceptive study of Gloria Naylor's novel, Linden Hills, which is examined in the context of other Dante-inspiredAfroAmerican works such as Ellison's Invisible Man and LeRoi Jones's TheSystemof Dante'sHell(aswell as the Nigerian Wole Soyinka'spoem, 'Purgatory').In a sense, Havely's essay gives a poignant direction to the entire collection, but the two concluding articles on Walcott and Heaney, by Mark Balfour and Bernard O'Donoghue, open up truly new vistas. The former'sreading of Dante's lesson in Walcott'snarrativepoetrywould get my prize. 'In the middle of thejourney through my life', proclaims 'Prelude' ( 948), the firstpiece in Walcott's Collected Poems.His latestcollection, TheBounty (1997), opens with an allusionto Paradiso, xxxiiI. UNIVERSITY OF ROME, 'LA SAPIENZA' PIERO BOITANI ThatDangerous Figure.Charles LambandtheCritics. ByJOSEPH E. RIEHL. (Literary Criticismin Perspective)Columbia, SC: Camden House. 1998. xi + 208 pp. ?45;$55 Literature of theRomantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide. Ed. by MICHAEL O'NEILL. Oxford:Clarendon Press. I998. viii + 4 Opp. 1I6.99. Not so long ago Jacques Derrida was asked why he had not written on Samuel Beckett.Derrida'sanswerwas characteristicallysuggestive(somemight sayevasive): whilst the idea of working on Beckett was attractive- here after all was a writer who seemed to share so many of the critic'spreoccupations - one would have to admit that the texts themselves were so elegantly deconstructive that additional deconstructiveworkwould seem unnecessary,not to say banal.Joseph E. Riehl, in his timely survey of critical readings of Charles Lamb runs the risk of drawing a similar conclusion. Dismissed for many years as 'trivial', 'sentimental', and 'regressive', everything that academic criticism with its dedication to the high modernistvalues of seriousness,austerityand moral rigouropposed, Lamb and his enthusiastswere all but silenced. It took a new generation of critics, interested in probing beneath the surface,to discoverthat Lamb was, afterall, a 'deeply serious' writerand thereforeworthyof consideration.Now of course,we have 'Post-Modern Lamb' and attention has turned towards what Lamb once called 'that dangerous figure -irony'. Yet with the exception of Seamus Perry in his excellent article The tension slackens slightly in the next section, on 'Victorian Evaluations'. Alison Milbank, author of a promising DanteandtheVictorians, chooses as her topic the poetical and critical fortune of the Paolo and Francescaepisode: after a very good opening comparison with AnnaKarenina and the outline of an interestingplot to come, however, her article (on 'Dante and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy') becomes fragmentary. From Ralph Pite, who published a stimulating book, The Circleof OurVision: Dante'sPresence in EnglishRomantic Poetry, one might expect an incisive essay on, say, Tennyson. Instead, we get a well-constructed and argued piece on a less fascinatingtopic, E. H. Plumptre'stranslationof Dante as a mirror of Victorian 'Faith', i.e., of nineteenth-century attitudes to religious and cultural doubt. In Part iv, 'Modern Revisions', the stage is taken by Pound, MacNeice, and Beckett. Matthew Reynolds's contribution on the first of these is elegant; Steve Ellis's...

Dante's Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney

Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Introduction: Dante's Afterlife: 1321-1997 N. Havely (editor) Selective Bibliography Pre-Romantic Prologue: Foreseeing and Foreknowing: Dante's 'Ugolino' and the Eton College Ode of Thomas Gary J. Roe Romantic Readings: Dante and Blake: Allegorizing the Event J. Tambling Figuration in Shelley and Dante S. Curran The Shelleys and Dante's Matilda W. Keach Victorian Evaluations: Moral Luck in the Second Circle: Dante and the Victorian Fate of Tragedy A. Milbank 'The Perilous Depth of Doubt': Dante, Plumptre and Victorian Faith R. Pite Modern Revisions: Ezra Pound: Quotation and Community M. Reynolds Dante and Louis MacNeice: a Sequel to the Commedia S. Ellis Purgatory Regained? Beckett and Dante H. Haughton Echoes in Post-War Italy: Micol and Beatrice: Echoes of the Vita Nuova in Giorgio Bassani's Garden of the Finzi-contini J. Woolf 'Una Fitta di Rimorso': Dante in Sereni P. Robinson Contemporary Directions: 'Prosperous People' and 'The Real Hell' in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills N. Havely The Place of the Poet: Dante in Walcott's Narrative Poetry M. Balfour Dante's Versatility and Seamus Heaney's Modernism B. O'Donoghue 'The Deep and Savage Path': Translation of Inferno, Canto 2 S. Heaney Index

Myth, Fairy Tale, Epic, and Romance: Narrative as Re-Vision in Linden Hills

When Virginia Fowler asked Gloria Naylor in a 1993 interview, "Do you see yourself as having some sort of prophetic role as an artist?" Naylor replied, "I see myself more as a filter than I do as a prophet. I see myself--I call myself within my own head a wordsmith. I'm a storyteller, I really am" (Fowler 143). Naylor's second novel is a masterpiece of storytelling, a tightly woven narrative of intertextualities, multiple layers of story that reiterate, revise, and invert familiar western texts. Critics have closely examined some of these intertexts, especially Dante's Inferno (Ward), Plato's Allegory of the Cave (Houmans), Virgil's Aeneid (Ward, Saunders), and the Gothic novel (Sandiford). Less has been written about the biblical myth as intertext in Linden Hills. This vast cycle of stories pervades the novel as Naylor constructs her inferno, explores the demonic dance of shadow in Willa's cave, traces Willie's epic journey through the Linden landscape, and, finally, destroys her Gothic mansion and the people who live there.

"Light from a Hill of Carbon Paper Dolls": Gloria Naylor's "Linden Hills" and Dante's "Inferno"

"Light from a Hill of Carbon Paper Dolls": Gloria Naylor's "Linden Hills" and Dante's "Inferno"

Incest and Intertextuality in Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie

How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies ?... Did she put on his knowledge his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (Yeats) The affirmative reviews which the publication of Thereafter Johnnie was announced suggest that new vision of Western culture and its battles has entered our midst. Writing for the New York Times Book Review, John Bierhorst compares Herron's fascinating and highly original novel about incest in middle-class African-American family to The Color Purple, Beloved, and Linden Hills because it adds mythic dimension to the experiences of African-Americans (16). Farai Chideya labels it gothic novel as well as blues lament and rap in Newsweek and writes that it is set against both backdrop of worldwide race war and the history of slave-era miscegenation (53). Barbara Christian's essay in The Women's Review of Books describes the novel as lyric poem and an epic that invokes ancient cultural while also grounding itself in the present and foretelling an apocalyptic future. Christian calls Herron a writer to be reckoned with and discusses the ways that the novel challenges ready-made cultural categories such as fact/fairy tale and family/race/nation (6-7). Thereafter Johnnie's intertextual focus underlines the extent to which incest is structured by received cultural narratives whose meanings, as Christian notes, are constantly subject to revision. Herron's project is similar to that of Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye because both novels collapse hegemonic myths to challenge male constructions of incest as consensual, erotic act by problematizing the notion of daughterly desire in contexts in which fathers are omnipotent. Thereafter Johnnie, however, functions as an important counterpoint to the brutal rape Pecola Breedlove experiences because it suggests that fathers bear primary responsibility for incest regardless of whether they induce desire in their daughters. To the extent that Herron's text is in dialogue The Bluest Eye, it can also be associated the ongoing exploration of incest's function within our culture that has preoccupied psychologists, feminists, and writers for the last two decades. Thereafter Johnnie joins growing list of female-authored novels that contradict the Freudian assertion that most incest claims are untrue expressions of forbidden daughterly desire. The earliest of these texts, The Bluest Eye (1970), has been followed by steady stream of novels that explore the roots of incest in American culture and its interactions institutions of race, gender, and class.(1) This novelistic insistence that allegations of childhood sexual abuse are true is supported by psychological theories that began during the 1970s to challenge the notion that all claims of incest are false.(2) Judith Herman began researching incest in 1975 because of discrepancies between her patients' stories of childhood sexual abuse and her clinical training, which told her to ignore them.(3) The feminist perspectives from which Herman and others worked gained support from clinicians such as Ruth S. and C. Henry Kempe, who dealt primarily those cases in which legal and social agencies became involved (3-9). Finally, the early 1980s witnessed psychoanalytical revisions of the Oedipal complex that challenge its assumptions that incest claims are invariably false. Alice Miller argues, for example, that adults confuse their desires for those of children and critiques theories that teach abused patients to view themselves as wicked, destructive, megalomanic, or homosexual (18). These new approaches to incest support each other, combining diverse clinical techniques the gendered analyses provided by feminism to provide more comprehensive model of incest within our culture and our families. …

"The Only Voice is Your Own": Gloria Naylor's Revision of The Tempest

In Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day, Reema's boy comes from university to conduct anthropological studies in Willow Springs, novel's mysterious setting. Attempting to preserve cultural identities against hostile social and political parameters, he frustrates Willow Springs's residents, for he does not to stories they have to tell him. With this character, Naylor introduces text's central theme, necessity of establishing narrative authority: Think about it: ain't nobody really talking to you. We're sitting here in Willow Springs, and you're God-knows-where. It's August 1999 - ain't but a slim chance it's same season where you are. Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: only is your own. (10) This passage foregrounds Naylor's persistent concern throughout literary career - establishing individual voice. In famous interview with Toni Morrison, Naylor candidly discloses anxiety about outside established traditions: I wrote because I had no choice, but that was a long road from gathering authority within myself to believe that I could actually be a writer. The writers I had been taught to love were either male or white. And who was I to argue that Ellison, Austen, Dickens, Brontes, Baldwin and Faulkner weren't masters? They were and are. But inside there was still faintest whisper: Was there no one telling my story? And since it appeared there was not, how could I presume to? Those were frustrating years. (574) That own be heard, it is necessary for Naylor to clear a space for her own a among texts. Her ambitious narrative project is in essence a declaration of independence - an acknowledgment of academic canon's value, but also an assertion of racial and gender difference. Without repudiation of that she obviously loves, she can tell story, but never at expense of own unique narrative voice. Naylor's quest for own voice is, of course, a central concern for most African American writers, discovered in the tension between oral and written modes of narration that is represented as finding a in writing (Gates 21). Her experimentation with in Mama Day represents a dramatic advance in artistic talent over two previous works. Unlike both The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, where narrator's is distinct from voices of characters, and where there is occasionally a tone of condescension, Naylor achieves in Mama Day what Gates calls a speakerly text - one that would seem primarily to be oriented toward imitating one of numerous forms of oral narration to be found in classical Afro-American vernacular literature (181). Mama Day's serves as a spiritual ballast in narrative, a guide to elemental (religious) truths that other characters must discover to set themselves free. But Naylor's employment of free indirect discourse throughout novel metaphorically unites with Miranda; distinction between writer's authority and speaker's set of communal values in Willow Springs is mitigated, if not erased. The free indirect discourse, then, acts as Naylor's thematic commentary, a sign not only of strength of black oral but also of transcendent solidity of Mama Day's thoughts and feelings.(1) Naylor thus situates herself at center of contemporary critical discussions of texts. Criticism has in past twenty years reformulated notion of literary history as a dynamic interplay of texts: We are now led to see a single work not simply as an autonomous, free-standing edifice but intertextually, as a that talks with and to other texts. J. Hillis Miller characterizes literary work as inhabited . . . by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts (446). Similarly, Roland Barthes describes as a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash . …

Authority, Multivocality, and the New World Order in Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe

B ailey's Cafe, Gloria Naylor's latest and most ambitious novel to date, is a hauntingly lyrical text steeped in biblical allusion. With this fourth novel, which completes a series including The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, and Mama Day, Naylor acquired the self-confidence necessary to define herself as a writer. Bailey's Cafe took me through the final step, Naylor remarked during a recent book tour stop. I had envisioned four novels that would lay the foundation for a career. This one finishes that up (qtd. in Due F2). In what is part of her ongoing search for an authorial voice with which to tell-or, rather, retell-the experiences of women of color, Naylor chooses to locate her fourth novel within a specifically cultured and gendered context where voice and all of its associations are directed toward subverting the myriad forms of authority patriarchy legitimizes and constructing a new world order among partially dispossessed women world-wide. The novel itself is comprised of a series of loosely connected storieseach one from a different woman's point of view-and it culminates with a magically real, communal celebration of the birth of Mariam's son George during the Christmas season. For the first time not only is there oneness among a culturally diverse group whose traditions and customs span the globe, but the voices of women also unify in the ritualization of George's arrival. George's long-awaited birth, like that of the Messiah, could signal either an end or, hopefully, new beginnings for the pluralistic group present. But in this climactic scene, after conjuring an image of global harmony, Naylor denies the reader/audience the privilege of knowing the fate of the young mother and son: Does Mariam find acceptance among an American Jewish community? What is to become of George, now en route to Wallace P. Andrews Boys' Home? The novel's unresolved closure serves to encourage a participatory involvement from the reader/audience and is a strategy

Healers in Gloria Naylor's Fiction

manifesting itself in care of others, been better presented than in the novels of Gloria Naylor. Less familiar than the triumvirate of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou, Naylor won a National Book Award in 1983 for best first novel and has published three others. Her works-The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), and Bailey's Cafe (1992)-feature themes of ancestry, generational conflict, economic exploitation, and lost dreams. In particular, Naylor has celebrated the power of love as a force that heals, bringing peace and wholeness. Her characters share their wealth: some through literal doctoring, others through psychic healing, still others through inspirational documents that they have left behind, and finally some through providing a haven for the needy. Although Naylor's healers sometimes resort to AMA- and APA-approved methods of restoring health, they transcend merely prescribing aspirin and engaging in talk therapy. Rather, they use holistic methods, archetypal practices, and even voodoo, linking themselves to atavistic practices of Africa. They heal heart and soul as well as body. As one of the major, though somewhat overlooked, African-American authors of the past two decades, Naylor herself has become what Marjorie Pryse terms a metaphorical conjure woman, a medium who, like Morrison, Walker, and others, make[s] it possible for . . . readers . . . to recognize their common literary ancestors (gardeners, quilt makers, grandmothers, root workers, and women who write autobiographies) and to name each other as a community of inheritors. Like her contemporaries, Pryse notes, Naylor highlights connection rather than separation, transforming silence into speech

In the Name of Love: Women. Masochism, and the Gothic (review)

Reviewed by: In the Name of Love: Women. Masochism, and the Gothic Frances L. Restuccia Michelle A. Massé . In the Name of Love: Women. Masochism, and the Gothic. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. 301 pp. $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Michelle A. Massé's In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic is a response to two questions posed explicitly—Are Gothic novels masochistic? and "Why do feminists still use Freud?"—as well as to two implicit questions—What is the etiology of masochism? and What is the prognosis? To Massé, certain Gothic texts "internalize and replicate the dynamics of oppression": Pauline Réage's The Story of O and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca present "object relations that reproduce the beating triangle" in Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten." (Even their readers become complicit.) Other Gothic texts such as Jane Eyre, Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Naylor's Linden Hills resist masochism by playing out the trauma caused by the prohibition of female autonomy (and therefore of identity in the real world), through repetition whose function it is to recognize that trauma. The Gothic can be self-sabotaging: it points to its own eventual cure. The answer, then, to Massé's first question is yes, only if we grant that works that repudiate "masochistic fantasy" are masochistic. Massé assumes that masochism is a cultural construction, produced primarily by Western culture's gender arrangements (which the Gothic reflects, shapes, and resists). She is admirably determined to show that "women are taught masochism through fiction and culture," that "masochism's causes are external and real," and that individual masochistic psychodramas are "part of a larger cultural production of discipline and punishment." Yet, even as she blasts Freud for constructing the female fantasy in "A Child Is Being Beaten" in a way that feminizes masochism, Massé employs Freud's beaten/beater/ spectator triangle as her paradigm of a masochistic economy to test out which of the three positions Gothic heroines occupy. For psychoanalysis "helps us to understand the Gothic's emphasis upon masochism as a key issue in feminine identity." We might be tempted to think that Massé relies on Freud because he passes along useful (albeit misogynistically contaminated) cultural paradigms. But Massé also regards "the linkage of love and dominance" as "psychological" and reiterates Jacqueline Rose's warning against a lopsided stress on the social at the expense of the psychic (which Rose of course regards as constitutively violent)—all of which implies an etiology distinct from her strenuously made cultural construction argument. Vaguely conflating women at varying levels of suffering, Massé wants "us" to realize that we "might awaken some day from the Gothic nightmare that is our own as well as our culture's." She seeks the abolition of sadomasochistic hierarchies; to this end she presents her study as a contribution to understanding, [End Page 995] in Jessica Benjamin's words, "how domination is anchored in the hearts of the dominated." But the formidable question of domination's appeal remains unanswered, if not unanswerable: for one thing Massé does not address sufficiently the challenging, complicating, crucially relevant issue of desire. Packed with useful references (I picked up a wealth of information from this study, for which I am grateful to Massé), and at many points captivating, In the Name of Love confused me conceptually in ways that precluded my fullest engagement. Frances L. Restuccia Boston College Copyright © 1992 Purdue Research Foundation

Gothic and Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills

Gothic and Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills

The Woman in the Cave: Recent Feminist Fictions and the Classical Underworld

In Gloria Naylor's novel Linden Hills, a grim fantasy of wealthy black suburbia with open acknowledgments to Dante's Inferno as well as to a series of classical and Christian underworlds, a lower hell opens below lowest circle Dante imagined: former morgue in a basement where Luther Nedeed, novel's Lucifer, imprisons his wife and their five-year-old son, without food or medicine, to turn her into a wife: that is, to punish her for bearing a child who does not resemble his father as exactly as Nedeed himself replicates his forefathers. Attempting to efface his wife as three generations of previous Luther Nedeeds had effaced their wives, Nedeed embodies a crime neither considered nor punished by Dante: crime of making (or attempting to make) women into disposable machines for replicating men. At end of novel, Willa Nedeed succeeds in giving miraculous birth to herself and to a revolutionary intention: the amber germ of truth she went to sleep with [the truth that she does exist, that she has her own name, and that she can walk up out of basement] conceived and reconceived itself, splitting and multiplying to take over every atom attached to her being.' Her son is already dead, and she too will die by end of novel, but Willa Nedeed's story of resistance and rebirth resonates not only with classical and later Western accounts of successful effacement of women but also with feminist critiques of and resistance to such effacement. This essay will read Linden Hills together with Luce Irigaray's Speculum of Other Woman, a work of political and cultural theory that relies on conventions of fiction to critique androcentric myths of reproduction such

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

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