Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Morrison expresses her desire to extend the study of American literature. Using the metaphor of a map, she writes that she wants to open this study to a “wider landscape” and cover a “critical geography” (3). She maintains that in her explorations, she will not function as a literary critic but instead as a writer. She is interested in examining the parts of a writer’s consciousness that remain out of touch to the writer. As a black woman, she also examines how free she and others can be in what she calls a “a highly and historically racialized society” (4).

Morrison investigates the claim, widely accepted among literary critics, that the presence of Africans and later African Americans did not affect American literature’s canon of works. Although the African and African-American presence shaped the Constitution as well as our history and culture, there is a commonly accepted idea that they did not shape white literature. However, Morrison believes that the central ideas of American literature—including individuality, social isolation, and innocence existing along with the idea of hell—are a response to the African and African-American presence in the US. In fact, she believes that this presence was crucial for the development of the uniqueness of American literature and the use of coded language it entails.

Morrison uses the term “Africanism” to refer to this investigation of how writers constructed the African-American presence in the US. Africanism became a way to discuss and refer to matters related to power, sex, class, and other issues. It was not unique to America but was present in European cultures as well that invented their notions of Africa. America, which was developing its own sense of cultural hegemony, developed its own sense of organizing its identity by distancing itself from Africanism.

She believes that traditional forms of literary criticism have “impoverished” (8) the literature itself. Morrison writes that Africanism cannot be separated from American literature and that literary “blackness” defines literary “whiteness” (9). The construction of whiteness was essential to the construction of what it means to be American, but literary criticism has to date evaded this investigation and has spoken of these matters in encoded ways. Ignoring rather than discussing race has been regarded as the polite, liberal thing to do, and this ignoring has prohibited us from making important insights into authors’ works. However, Morrison notes that removing these “niceties” (10) can also lead to subjectivity.

Another reason that race has not fully been examined in American literature arises from the tendency to always view racism from the perspective of its effect on its victim. While the author applauds these efforts, she writes that it is valuable to look at the effect of racism not only on slaves, but also on masters. While historians and others have examined these areas, literary critics who do so are branded too “political” (12). Morrison writes that she may be seen as having a self-serving agenda, as she is black, but she proposes how to ignore race in American literature is impossible in a culture that has a “racially inflected language” (13).

While many literary critics do not read African-American literature, they also do not see the effects of race on the literature they do read. Their refusal to read works by African-American writers repeats when they read white texts without appreciating the African presence in them. She mentions several texts—from authors Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and others—in which black characters and an understanding of the white reactions to the African presence in America are critical. Similarly, literary critics have long ignored feminist discourse.

At first, Morrison believed that black people had little effect on white writers. However, she then began to read as a writer, and she saw how racial ideologies had affected literature. She wanted to explore how the Africanist narrative and idiom affected the writer’s imagination. She came to realize that “the subject of the dream is the dreamer” (17). The construction of an Africanist identity was a reflection of the writer’s own dreams and fears. She compares making this realization to seeing the bowl that surrounds the contents of a fishbowl. Using her knowledge of the craft of writing, she began to realize that American authors had presented themselves through the lens of being surrounded by an Africanist perspective.

Morrison uses Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl to examine the cultural blindness that contributed to scholars not recognizing the effects of the Africanist presence on literature. Although many critics have noted the failures of the book, few have thought about why the book failed. Morrison writes that the “flight” present in the book is not only that of the plot, in which a slave girl escapes northward, but also Cather’s flight from recognizing the complex dynamics of a white woman, named Sapphira, interacting with her black slave. The slave mistress, as a result of unfounded jealousy over her husband, plans to have her nephew rape the slave girl, Nancy. Morrison highlights the silence of the slave woman’s mother in the face of these dire circumstances. This silence, Morrison writes, comes out of the silence around the 400-year-old presence of Africanism in the US, but it makes the slave’s mother, Till, problematic and unbelievable as a character. Nancy herself has no recourse or person to turn to, save Rachel, the slave mistress’s pro-abolitionist daughter. Nancy is, as Morrison writes, “a cipher” (24).

Sapphira’s attempt to deflower Nancy is nonsensical, as it would not prevent a liaison between Nancy and Sapphira’s husband, but Cather does not examine the degrading effect that slavery has on Sapphira, who constructs her own kind of flight by projecting her failing body onto the young body of Nancy. But at least, Morrison writes, Sapphira can construct a self, whereas Nancy cannot. Morrison believes Cather’s plot is a way merely to satisfy herself, as Cather had a problematic relationship with her own mother. Morrison believes Cather regresses to a child at the end of the story, in which Till reinforces the idea of the benevolence of slavery.