Our humanity has been so little explored and so little made
available to us through art that sometimes we doubt it ourselves and live
one-dimensional lives because that’s all we imagine can be possible.
Literature, if it does nothing else, should stimulate one’s imaginary to
know that there is more—maybe not more ‘out there,’ but more inside of us
that we can use for our own survival (Shange, in Lester 1990, 730).
Bildungsroman may be particularly attractive for women writers not only
because of its focus on becoming, on individuality as malleable rather than
fixed, but also because its conventions foreground the dialectical
interactions of the individual and society in a manner also characterizing
much feminist theory about the interplay of personal experience and
socio-cultural formations (Boesenberg 1999, 6).
Feminist Leitmotif: “Coming of Age”
contemporary African American women’s works, the pattern of the nuclear
family is destroyed. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of
Brewster Place, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple are
suggestive examples of dissipated family lives, torn by racial and social
conflicts. Swimming against this narrative stream, Shange creates in
Betsey Brown a text radiating from the notion of the unified family. As
the above epigraph reveals, the writer’s intention is to make us aware of
the need to explore in depth the positive aspects of humanity—family being
one of them.
self-assertion is crucial in Shange’s work that shapes racial protest though
reconstructions of main itineraries of black female identity in connection
with the private and public sphere. Her intense preoccupation with
woman-centered issues relates gender to new perspectives on race and class,
by means of “tools that are available to [her] as a feminist reconstructing
history” (Shange, in Lester 1990, 727). In a black female tradition
embroidered with silence, Shange insists on the piercing need of women’s
spiritual development and on their ability to produce radical change in the
literary discourse. Importantly, the power of naming functions as a
leitmotif in her life and work. Born Paulette Williams, she adopts a Zulu
name: Ntozake (“she who comes with her own things”) and Shange (“she who
walks like a lion”). Her interest in subtle onomastic connotations is also
reflected in her choice of titles for her works of fiction, all of them
bearing significant names: Sassafrass: A Novella (1976), Melissa &
Smith (1978), Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1983), Betsey
Brown (1985), and Liliane (1994).
interview with Neal Lester, Shange expresses her wish to write something
that fills a gap, something that she dearly wanted to read as a child
coming of age in a segregated America. Just like Morrison and Walker,
Shange’s creative impulse springs from her desire to write what she would
have liked to read:
I’d like to be part of a
collection of books by women that someone might give a female child. It
simply didn’t exist when I was a child; the books weren’t there and that’s
what I meant. I’m lucky that Alice Childress still writes; June Jordan still
writes; Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Kitty Tsui… The mere presence of these
women in print has to be of moral assistance to young women (1990, 721).
correlate Shange’s point with African American women’s literature written in
the last two centuries, we notice that examples of female rites of passage
are not few and can be easily found in works by Harriet Wilson, Harriet
Jacobs, Frances Harper, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and
many others. However, Shange draws attention to the necessity of creating an
anthology specially designed to focus on young women’s development, with a
view on actual problems.
Betsey Brown represents a fine example of a book intended to provide
young women with moral assistance, being centered on a female child growing
up in a nation marked by racial progress. The book offers an insight into
the life a middle class African American family whose inner peace is
disturbed by the “changing values in the black community and the effects of
legislated integration” (Blain, Grundy, and Clements 1990, 970). It is 1957,
the year of school integration, when black children have to “take up for the
whole damn race,” and “to do battle with the white man” (Shange 1985, 135).
aesthetic and the political views, Shange’s novel remarkably parallels the
personal story of Betsey’s attaining self-confidence with the social
achievements of the Civil Rights Movement. In the black community of St.
Louis, Betsey’s private drama becomes emblematic: at age thirteen, her life
weaves together the bright threads of an incipient romance with the darker
ones of racism and prejudice. In a distinctive female genealogy, the writer
places Betsey’s story next to that of her mother and grandmother, thus
making us conscious that “black women’s relation to history is first of all
a relationship to mother and grandmother” (Willis 1987, 5). In a house in
which three generations of women dovetail with each other, men’s stories are
not forgotten, the father playing the multiple roles of a positive parental
figure, a dedicated social activist, and a doctor for his community.
It is the
aim of this article to demonstrate that Shange’s Betsey Brown can be
read in an intertextual dialogue with two basic texts of the black female
tradition: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and Jessie Fauset’s
Plum Bun (1929).
Like her precursors, Shange uses the specific tropes of the black female
sentimental romance, such as the insistence on the domestic setting and the
heroic quest for racial freedom. Moreover, Shange’s claim that she writes
“feminist, not feminine” literature lies at the core of her transformative
power that reconfigures the genre of sentimental romance (Shange, in Lester
In order to
offer a general framework, the next section offers an analysis of the
context of women’s sentimental fiction. It is followed by two parts that
develop the specific tropes of the black female sentimental romance—the
insistence on the domestic setting and the heroic quest for racial
freedom—in relation with Betsey Brown. In a comparative reading with
Harper’s and Fauset’s novels, the paper further highlights how Shange
subverts women’s stereotypical representations, creating a polytropic
character whose coming of age in a moment of crisis initiates a flight from
section discusses how Shange reconsiders the passing-for-white plot, another
common element with Harper’s and Fauset’s works. If in Iola Leroy and
Plum Bun, the passing-for-white plot is dominant, in Betsey
Brown, it becomes a subplot unveiled through the elders’ memory.
Importantly, all three novelists suggest that race is not simply determined
by biological factors, but mostly by cultural and social conditions. Even if
the act of passing might bring privileges, it implies discarding a valuable
racial inheritance and a strong communal belonging.
Sentimental Romance: “Consummated Rights of Families”
the cliché of the woman-as-the-pillar-of-the-house, sentimental romance was
a fashionable genre proliferated by nineteenth century white texts, to be
also adopted by African American authors. Examples of black women’s
sentimental fiction are Amelia Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne (1890),
Emma Dunham Kelley’s Megda (1891), Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy
(1892), Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1900), and Jessie
Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929).
By adopting the white literary model, these black female writers also
adapted the white standard of womanhood, striving to create virtuous
self-projections, chaste apparitions forged out of Christian norms.
Significantly, sentimental romance has gravitated to the most dangerous word
in the African American past—love—whose emotional force had always
triggered the mechanisms of conflict on the racial battlefield. Love among
slaves simply meant rebellion, going against a repressive system that took
the child away from the mother, the husband from the wife. “Thick” love, as
Morrison reminds us, was risky (1997, 45). Under the control of white
masters, the body of the black woman was not a site of love, but one of
procreation, being part of the economic production of increasing the slave
American women permanently exposed to physical abuse, fiction shaped an
unattainable dream of social happiness—almost impossible to reach while in
bondage. Working within the limited discourse of white sentimental romance,
black women were also “preoccupied with middle-class propriety, civility,
domesticity, and commodity consumption” (Tate 1991, 106). The high value
laid on marriage represented a mark of both gender and racial liberation, so
that these sentimental narratives illustrated “the inalienable rights of
black people as the consummated rights of families” (Tate 1991, 126).
their permanent struggle to overcome the conditions of the degrading racial
system, black women have undermined the patriarchal assumption about the
relationship between women’s so-called weak sex and their
circumscribed domestic roles.
Their inferior status both as blacks and women has contributed to the
creation of a social context for them totally different from that for white
women. African American women’s romance has incorporated accordingly the
elaborate meanders of the black female existential journey. Their exemplary
stories are haunted by forced separations between relatives and by lifelong
searches culminating in deus ex machina encounters. Projected upon
this harsh reality, black women’s drama is transfigured into heroic modes of
action contributing to racial progress. The darker the background, the
brighter the traits of the heroine. Since “black characters extricate
themselves from incredible situations, perform incredible deeds, triumph
over corrupt forces,” romance serves “as the predominant literary mode for
transforming black history into mythic fiction” (Campbell 1986, xi).
In this way,
African American women have appropriated the white sentimental genre by
transforming the static feminine image into a mobile character whose
physical and mental movement defies the normative patriarchal and racist
system. The female character’s audacious trajectory thus reaches its climax
in an idealized domestic setting, so that heroism culminates in marriage. As
Tate cogently notes, black women’s sentimental romance combines “the
discourses of matrimony and liberation” (1991, 100).
“Happily Ever After:” Domestic Settings
modulations of black sentimental romance reemerge in Shange’s Betsey
Brown, whose textual motifs rework the ideal atmosphere of the domestic
setting and the heroic quest for racial liberation.
Numerous intertextual parallels can be traced between Shange’s late
twentieth century text, Harper’s late nineteenth century Iola Leroy,
and Fauset’s Harlem Renaissance novel Plum Bun. In spite of the
temporal span between their works, all three authors skillfully focus on
subverting fixed feminine roles. All of them present key moments in women’s
existence, drawing on the black character’s social and spiritual
achievement, either as an activist (Harper), or as an artist (Fauset), or as
Harper, and Fauset start by adopting a fairy tale scenario, which they later
subvert in order to concentrate on the heroine’s quest. Thus, the image of
the happy-family-blessed-with-children is the background of Harper’s and
Fauset’s story. Both novels present the difference between parents in terms
of racial status and skin color: white husband/mulatto wife in Harper’s
text, and dark-skinned husband/light-skinned wife in Fauset’s text. In both
novels, the love affair is shadowed by social compromises.
Leroy, Harper tells us that, twenty years before the Civil War, Eugene
Leroy decided to get married to a former slave, Marie, whom he manumits and
educates. Even if Marie has a fair complexion and can easily pass for white,
her marriage to a white man is seen as an offense against the social customs
of the South. Her education allows her to voice her frustrations: “I think
one of the great mistakes of our civilization is that which makes color, and
not character, a social test" (1893, 84). This is one of the reasons why
they do not tell their children about their racially mixed blood, and
educate them as white people. This fragile nest so affectionately built by
the Leroys is suddenly shattered by the death of Eugene, a fact that reduces
Marie to her former slave status. Brutally awakened from her dreams of
familial happiness, their daughter Iola is turned into a tragic mulatta,
harassed by her white master.
fairy-tale pattern is subverted in Fauset’s Plum Bun, which begins
with the common trope of a happy family consisting of parents and two girls
living in Philadelphia in the 1920s. The fairy-tale background is also
stressed by the stories the mother reads to the two sisters, which always
end with “and they lived happily ever after, just like your father and me.”
At a time when racial conflict manifested violently through lynchings and
urban riots, the color line leads to a division in the Murray family: father
and Virginia who are dark-skinned are set in contrast with mother and Angela
who are light-skinned. While the couple father-Virginia remains caught
inside the borders of the black community, the other couple, mother-Angela,
can pass for white and freely elude racial limits. Again, like in Iola
Leroy, the family’s equilibrium is unbalanced by the death of the father
(shortly followed by mother’s death).
In a similar
way to her precursors’ texts, Shange’s novel centers on the main subject
matter of the nuclear family. At the end of the 1950s, the writer crayons
the daily lifestyle of a black family composed of grandmother, mother (Jane)
and father (Greer), three sisters (Betsey, Margot, and Sharon), a brother
(Allard), and a cousin (Charley). Their prosperous middle class status is
mostly owed to Greer’s position as a doctor in a segregated hospital. While
Jane has feminist ideas about women’s profession (this is why she keeps her
job as a social worker), Greer has reformative ideas about racial progress,
insisting on the importance of social protests. His standpoint on
African-ness is reinforced each morning in a ritual of singing and dancing
designed for the whole family in the rhythm of the conga drum.
grandmother’s perspective, the young couple’s progressive attitude is
contrasted with an old-fashioned mentality, laying stress on skin color and
Jane was lucky, Grandma
thought. None of the chirren looked like him, all dark and kinky-headed. Not
it was true that Betsey had a full mouth. Margot was chocolate brown. Sharon
had a head full of nappy hair. Allard was on the flat-nose side. But in
Grandma’s mind Jane had been blessed, cause each of the chirren was
sprightly and handsome on a Geechee scale, not them island one but the
Charlestonians who’d been light or white since slavery. But Grandma didn’t
like to think about slavery. She was most white. Slaves and alla that had
nothing to do with her family, until Jane insisted on bringing this Greer
into the family and he kept making family (19).
comic undertones in grandmother’s monologue, racist ideas emerge subsuming
(lack of) color to a physical scale of value—which has nothing to do with
mental skills or moral merits. By highlighting how the nineteenth century
genteel mentality has survived till the present time, Shange makes us aware
that opposite views can coexist in the same family: old habits of mind
Brown’s narrative thread unfolds, like in Harper’s and Fauset’s novels,
the peaceful existence of a black family is troubled. However, unlike in
Harper’s and Fauset’s texts (where the idyllic parental liaison is broken by
death) in Shage’s novel the harmonious family unit is never broken, even if
it is shaken twice: from the inside, by the elder daughter’s running away
from home; from the outside, by the Black Power Movement and the cultural
upheaval of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In this direction, the next
section discusses Betsey’s private drama, with a view on the social and
moral changes of her time. In spite of these psychological and racial
earthquakes, the family continues to exist as a whole—to live “happily ever
Female Quest: “Paving the Way”
can heal past wounds, then Betsey Brown’s fresh, optimistic tone
redeems the black female image by placing her in a familial context imbued
with love. Moreover, one of the strongest points of Shange’s writing is her
ability to redefine black existence, by making us aware of the dangers of a
conventional life. Presenting her protagonist’s quest, the writer does not
shatter this familial happiness (as in the case of Harper and Fauset), but
remodels it through crucial interactions between the private and the public
Betsey’s image in connection with Harper’s and Fauset’s protagonists, it can
be noticed that Iola and Angela initially feel no need to move away from
their family’s influence, and it is the tragic death of parental figures
that marks the beginning of an existential crisis. In comparison, Betsey’s
inner struggle is present from the beginning in her escapist thoughts, in
her desire to fly away from her family’s smug cocoon—this ambivalent
receptacle—that both chokes and protects her. To quote Michael Cooke,
Betsey’s passage is one from “self-veiling” (“an assertive, undemanding
adaptation to the environment”) to “intimacy” (“freedom from compulsion and
a lucid, prompt communication with [the] spirit and world” (1984, 8)).
first paragraphs in the novel, the schematic blissfulness of the
Jane-and-Greer family is both highlighted and questioned. Betsey’s desire to
break free from her family’s encircling mentality is set in contrast with
her siblings’ settled life. While the house is asleep, Betsey’s awakening at
dawn is not simply a physical act, but mostly a mental ritual of watching
the horizon that offers her an insight into her own existence through
“innumerable perspectives of the sun” (13).
marked by symbols of ascension—the terrace, the porch, the stairs, and the
tree—suggestively places Betsey’s inner growth in isolation from the others.
The young girl’s Thoreauvian ideal of self-reliance appears in antithesis
with the “lives of quiet desperation”
experienced by the black inhabitants of St. Louis: “There was a preciousness
to St. Louis at dawn or dusk that was settling to the child in the midst of
a city that rankled with poverty, meanness, and shootings Betsey was only
vaguely aware of” (14). Ironically, the above lines will be further
subverted, since Betsey will later leave her ivory tower and discover on her
own the social and racial degradation. By running away from home, she will
have access to other social strata, much different from her parents’
middle-class way of life.
contrast with the daily fracas of her big family routine, Betsey’s solitude
as a watcher-of-the-horizon allows her to deliberately create a private,
imaginative sphere by “taking in the world all on her own” (16). “The
littlest porch on the third floor” becomes a liberating topos,
similar to the garret described by Harriet Jacobs in her nineteenth century
autobiographical narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. If
for Jacobs physical freedom was at stake, for Betsey spiritual development
is essential, as disclosed by her rhetorical question with strong moral
implications: “How could she become a great anything with all this
foolishness going on around her?” (17).
question initiates a search for identity, pendulating from self-deception to
self-knowledge in a decisive attempt to fulfill her potentiality. Seen
through Gabriel Liiceanu’s lens, Betsey strives to move way from “this
terrible universe of things and beings-as-things,” in order to remember the
self “as a subject of one’s liberty and existence” (1975, 165). And it is
the oak tree as a secret place of meditation that allows the young girl to
ponder both romantic and political ideas.
girl’s polytropic character and symbolical ascension is also suggested by
her choice to recite Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, a crucial reminder of the
importance of self-expression in black people’s existence:
Who dat knockin’ at de do’?
Why, Ike Johnson, yes, fu’
Come in, Ike. I’s mighty
You come down. I t’ought
At me ‘bout de othah night,
An was stayin’ ‘way fu’
Say, now, was you mad fu’
W’en I kin’ o’ laughed at
Speak up, Ike, an ‘spress
Betsey for the Elocution Contest, Dunbar’s poem dramatizes the act of
self-affirmation on a literary, racial, and morall level.
literary level, Betsey’s choice of an African American poet inaugurates a
change in the literary canon of her school formerly dominated by white
authors such as Whittier, Dickinson, Robinson, and Kipling. Shange suggests
that this redefinition of literary taste has occurred because students have
started to understand literary and social matters differently. If in the
past the chosen authors were Shakespeare and Byron, now “Dunbar, Hughes, and
Fawcett were the champions of her new changes” (37).
racial level, the poem discloses the importance of liberating black
identity, of reclaiming the possibility of open speech denied to black
people by white ideology. In the poem, the interlocutor is eliciting a
response from Ike/the Other, while striving to make him speak, and therefore
break a historical silence. The recurrent question also draws attention to
the African American’s choked feelings of anger and frustration at the
imprisoning racial system.
on the moral level, Betsey’s reciting individualizes the poem by endowing it
with an erotic message that playfully deconstructs the artificially puritan
language of romance: “‘Who dat knocking at de do’?’ took on a more
coquettish tease than Betsey’d ever revealed” (38). The message of the poem
is thus related with Betsey’s incipient romance, with her first thoughts of
love knocking at the adolescence’s door.
reconfigures here the conventional representation of the “good girl” by
contrasting Betsey’s image with both a debauched and a pure version of
femininity: Betsey is neither a Jezebel nor a Madonna. Definitely, she does
not subscribe to the modern, cosmeticized model of her age, exemplified by
her two colleagues, Mavis and Liliana, whose luring sexuality exposed as a
“sign of grown-up-ness” prevents them from studying (38). At the same time,
Betsey’s portrait differs from the nineteenth century, fair-skinned
renderings of femininity—those characters whose virginal minds were never
clouded by sexual impulses. In this way, Betsey moves away from
stereotypical versions of femininity, inasmuch as she wants to be herself—to
be an Ikette who speaks up.
version of pure femininity in Betsey Brown intertextually sends us to
Harper’s Iola and Fauset’s Angela—two classic examples of tragic mulattas
who strive to keep their purity and remain “good girls,” in spite of the
unfriendly system that labels them as objects of desire. Both Iola and
Angela have to beware white male characters whose courtship offers them
either marital security or financial stability. While Iola totally rejects
the possibility of passing for white, Angela is dramatically enticed by the
advantages of racial transgression.
fin de siècle blueprint, a “lady-like” mulatta who can easily pass for white
has the option to betray her racial belonging in exchange of social
prosperity. Twice Iola refuses Dr. Gresham’s marriage proposal. Speaking
about race as an “insurmountable barrier” between herself and her white
suitor, Iola draws attention to the fact that she would never accept
willingly to deny her African American inheritance: “I have too much
self-respect to enter your home under a veil of concealment” (1893, 117).
Harper takes pains in describing Iola as a heroic woman, “young in years,
but old in sorrow” (1893, 59), as disclosed in Dr. Gresham’s mixture of
sentimental and scientific discourse:
Yes; and that puzzles me.
She is one of the most refined and lady-like women I ever saw. I hear she is
a refugee, but she does not look like the other refugees who have come to
our camp. Her accent is slightly Southern, but her manner is Northern. She
is self-respecting without being supercilious; quiet, without being dull.
Her voice is low and sweet, yet at times there are tones of such passionate
tenderness in it that you would think some great sorrow has darkened and
overshadowed her life. Without being the least gloomy, her face at times is
pervaded by an air of inexpressible sadness. (1893, 57)
reconsiders the boundaries of sentimental romance and disclaims a static
role for her character.
Iola’s refusal of conjugal safety in favor of her mother’s race initiates
what Heller calls “a feminized quest toward a self-naming or self-mapping”
(1990, 93). The slave narrative scenario focused on the search of the absent
maternal figure is reenacted here in connection with an ideal of racial
advancement. Finally, Iola’s domestic bliss is strongly related to her
self-fulfillment as a social activist who “casts [her] lot with the freed
people as a helper, teacher, and friend” (1893, 114). As she gets married to
a mulatto doctor and they go to live in the South, their marriage does not
simply mark the beginning of a settled family life, but mostly of an
existence dedicated to social activism, placed on the altar of racial
later, the avatars of the tragic mulatta reemerge in Fauset’s Plum Bun.
Moving away from the safe paternal home in a black district of Philadelphia,
Angela starts her quest as an artist in New York. Unlike Iola, Angela denies
her black belonging and changes her name from Murray to Mory to efface all
signs of her former identity. She dearly craves for the privileges b(r)ought
by marriage to a white man:
If she were to do this, do
it suitably, then all the richness, all that fullness of life which she so
ardently craved would be doubly hers… only it would be fun, great fun to
capture power and protection in addition to the freedom and independence
which she had so long coveted and which now lay in her hand (1990, 88).
Foreman points out that that there is a lot at stake in Fauset’s novel so
easily overlooked by critics. Thus, Fauset’s aim is double, as she employs
“the language of the sentimental romance to articulate a stunning invective
against white male power” (1990, 651). While Fauset uses the conventional
plot of the sentimental romance, her “discourse of love works to veil her
exploration of how the dynamics of power hierarchies function. The plot is a
skeleton which Fauset fleshes out through her exploration of hegemony”
(Foreman 1990, 652). Race is no longer considered a biological factor, but a
social construct, and, as Angela’s inner monologue subtly discloses, the
white skin color can function as an empowering shield: “She was happier; she
was living on the crest of a wave of excitement and satisfaction which would
never wane, never break, never be spent… She was young, she was intelligent,
she was white” (1990, 87-88).
makes us aware of women’s oppression as an interracial problem at the
interface of race, gender, and class. Indeed, Angela’s passing for white
does not suffice, and the possibility of marriage to the rich Roger Fielding
is denied to her. Stealing inside another racial identity is not enough, and
class becomes the main issue. At this stage, Angela’s quest is a surrogate
adventure, since she is caught in the very net she has tried to avoid by
coveting freedom through male protection. This is the moment when she
realizes that only by means of artistic expression she can transcend her
objectified social status. Like Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,
Angela has a natural gift for painting that becomes her elevated refuge.
This creative impulse makes her free, able to move away from a prejudiced
New York to a less prejudiced Paris, and pursue her artistic career.
Finally, Angela’s love affair with Anthony (a mulatto artist) can take place
only after her self-empowerment as an artist, and even so their future
marriage is uncertain and the novel remains open-ended.
Significantly, the main idea of female liberation can be intertextually
traced in Shange’s novel by drawing comparisons with Harper’s and Fauset’s
texts. If Iola’s quest culminates with her role as a social activist and if
Angela finds self-fulfillment as an artist, in Shange’s Betsey Brown
the activist/artist images are conflated. Betsey wants to become a dancer, a
singer, an artist, whose mission is to change the face of the world and
destroy the white semiotics of power:
She’d just wanted to see the
world. Marry a Negro man of renown. Change the world. Use white folks’
segregated restaurant tables to dance on, and tear down all the “Colored
Only” and “Colored Not Allowed” signs. She wanted to be somebody. She wanted
to be Miss Elizabeth Brown out in the world, not in a house full of children
still learning their tables and long division (152).
her morning ritual of ascension, Betsey’s inner quest reaches its climax
when she decides to run away from home, to escape from the conventional
circle of her family, perceived as alienating: “I don’t belong here,” writes
Betsey’s note (143). Her crisis is generated by her difference from the
others, (both from her family and from the white people). Her private
language of freedom is set in tension with various dominant discourses. As
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese affirms, “since emancipation, black women have been
torn between their independent relation to the dominant culture and their
people’s relation to it” (1990, 199). Fox-Genovese’s remark suits Betsey’s
feeling of being caught between her own liberating thoughts and her
community inferior position in a town dominated by white hegemonic forces.
light, Betsey’s personal escape is deeply related to the racial uplift of
the 1960s, the school integration programme initiated by the postwar Civil
Rights Movement. Shange carefully chooses 1957—a significant temporal frame
for her novel. It is the year when “black students, protected by federal
troops, attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas”
(Horton and Horton 2001, 268). In 1955, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress,
boarded a city bus and refused to offer her seat to a white male passenger,
a daring act for which she was arrested. In 1954, in Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka, Supreme Court declared public school
segregation unconstitutional, so that separate was considered
“unequal.” Mostly, five years before, in 1952, for the first time in seventy
years, no lynching had been reported.
novel, Betsey’s role in the struggle for social rights designates her as one
of those children who have to attend a white school, for “paving the way for
those yet to come” (91). Supported by her father, against her mother’s and
grandmother’s will, Betsey has “to learn the same things with white
children” (92). Her traumatic experience is rendered in the language of loss
and mourning, of absence and invisibility: “the new school… loomed like a
granite tomb over her head;” “it was like [the white children] were all
dead;” “maybe they couldn’t see her;” “they chose not to, like the color of
her skin was a blight” (98-99). Thrown into a social void, Betsey’s
estrangement from the others is mitigated only by Mrs. Leon, an unprejudiced
teacher who is the first to address Betsey by her name.
During Mrs. Leon’s lesson, Betsey reveals her knowledge of Africa—a thing
that makes the other white pupils reconsider their own understanding of
It was luck or planning on
Mrs. Leon’s part, but the geography lesson had all to do with Africa. Greer
had insisted that his children know every emerging African state’s name and
location, so Betsey was soaring with information. It turned out that the
children didn’t hate her actually, they just didn’t know what to do with
her. They’d never seen colored who didn’t work for them or playing in some
part of town nobody wanted to live in. But as the words Ghana, Nigeria,
Sierra Leone, and Senegal rolled off Betsey’s tongue, they sounded as
romantic as France, Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, or Bulgaria (100).
the young girl’s running away from home has deep psychological and moral
implications, being triggered by her desire to escape both her familial and
social boundaries. Her quest gains momentum from her desire to attain a
free, polytropic identity, to refashion herself into an Ikette, to have a
room of her own, a name of her own, and a marital status of her own: “I’m
Miss Cora Sue Betsey Anne Calhoun Brown, soon to be married to a Negro man
of renown” (119). Freedom does not exclude marriage, in a literary frame
where ideal domesticity coexists with heroic action for racial liberty.
Through Betsey’s struggle, Shange draws attention to women’s possibility of
fulfillment in both the private and public spheres. Women’s “pursuit of more
self-directed lives” does not exclude their interactions with the community
(Boesenberg 1999, 7).
story is not one of lost innocence, but one of innocence preserved. Her
journey to the colored section of the town—as far away as possible from the
white section—represents her first step toward the troubled world of
adulthood. Mrs. Maureen, the black hairdresser, is for Betsey the epitome of
freedom, in a place “where she could learn more bout satisfaction and earn a
decent day’s pay by sweeping all the cut hair up off the floor” (124).
Ironically, the climax of Betsey’s adventure proves to be an anti-climax and
reality does not suit her dreams. She learns about class differences in Mrs.
Maureen’s salon, which is at night a place of gathering for prostitutes, a
forbidden zone totally different from the safe haven of the Brown family.
Suggestively, Betsey encounters here Regina, one of the housekeepers who
worked for her family in the past—now pregnant out of wedlock and hence
reduced to an inferior status. It is Regina who understands Betsey’s
loneliness in the white school, and tells the young girl about her inner
beauty as part of humanity: “There is no such thing as ordinary, Betsey.
Nobody’s ordinary. Each one of us is special and it’s the coming together of
alla that that makes the world so fine” (136). In a symbolic gesture of
female solidarity, Regina wants to give Betsey’ s name to her baby.
novel suggests the insurmountable class division between characters with
different backgrounds. If Regina’s love story ends tragically in lonely
pregnancy, Betsey’s romance is related with the rapture of a protected
coming of age: “Regina held Betsey real close to her. “Betsey, your life
isn’t gonna be like mine. Don’t you grow up too soon. Take your time.
There’s something so special when you’re really in love, let it come to you.
Don’t chase it” (139). In this way, Shange plays with the pattern of
sentimental romance by weaving together several narrative plots. We witness
not only the Browns’ happy marriage and Betsey’s incipient love, but also
Regina’s failed romance. Regina’s free love is contrasted with grandmother’s
puritan precepts advocating no sexual relations out of wedlock. Juxtaposing
these feminine perspectives, the writer connects old and new perceptions of
romance and family—bridging the nineteenth and twentieth century
Passing-for-White Plot: “Talking Out the Sides of Her Mouth”
Reconsidering sentimental fiction, Shange’s text plays with another
convention: the-fin-de-siecle/beginning-of-the-twentieth-century obsession
with passing, a scenario where the mulatto character is faced with the
choice of adopting a white-masked identity and of denying his/her
black belonging. Initiated by the nineteenth century realities, the
passing-for-white plot kept reappearing until the first half of the
twentieth century. It can be traced in Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their
Friends (1852), Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Charles
Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), James Weldon Johnson’s
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jessie Fauset’s
Plum Bun (1929), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and John
Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1959). If in the above works the
passing-for-white is a powerful plot, after the 1960s—a time when the
emergence of the Black Power Movement stressed the importance of blackness
as a value per se—the plot of passing disappears or is turned into a
Representatively, in Harper’s and Fauset’s texts, sentimental romance is
subsumed to the novel-of-passing: their main protagonists can be easily
ascribed a white identity, having light complexions and refined manners. As
shown above, both writers make use of the stereotypical image of the tragic
mulatta, which they subvert in order to save their light-skinned characters
from the trap of accepting the privileges of the white race and rejecting
their darker half. “The best blood in my veins is African blood,” declares
Iola, “and I am not ashamed of it" (Harper 1893, 209). Even if Iola
initially believes that she is white, and even if Angela is lured by the
social empowerment of whiteness, both heroines learn to appreciate the value
of their racial inheritance.
Betsey Brown reworks the passing-for-white plot in an indirect, covert
way. The leitmotif of passing emerges via the older generation, woven by
grandmother’s memories of grandfather’s light skin and ability to pass, to
behave like a white man “even when he opened his mouth” (29):
Fine diction, mighty fine
articulation, Vida’d recall. His dark hair hangin like a drop of black honey
cross his eye; that part as a Cherokee’s aim. Yes, her Frank was a truly
fine man. Not on the order of the modern men of color she’d come across in
her daughter’s life. No, there was a gentleness bout Frank that they’d lost
contrasts here grandmother’s mentality with the younger generation’s ideas
represented by Jane, the light skinned daughter, who prefers to get married
to a darker man, thus revealing an understanding of values that transgresses
the predicaments of the color line.
the writer suggests that the passing-for-white plot can also emerge nowadays
in a camouflaged way by adopting a white code of conduct. The Browns’
middle-class condition is comparable with that of a white family in similar
circumstances. Metaphorically, their lifestyle can pass for white. As
Greer suggests, the feeling of belonging can be maintained only through
racial awareness and social protest. Hence, his daily “Africanizing.” Hence,
his desire to publicly demonstrate together with his whole family against
racism: “the time has come for us to do something about our second-class
citizenship, and this separate but equal travesty we call our lives” (156).
enthusiasm is not shared by Jane who in her turn protests by moving away
from home for a while. For her, family values must be placed above the
racial ones: “My babies aren’t cannon fodder” (159). As in her daughter’s
case, leaving home for Jane proves to be a necessary moment of redefinition.
centrifugal forces of Shange’s text, one of the most audible voices raised
against the adoption of a white code of manners comes from the black
mammy/housekeeper, Carrie. At a time of crisis when the mother figure is
absent, Carrie’s strong sense of values maintains the family’s cohesion: “We
gonna make this house be as grand as we want it to be” (169). She helps
Betsey and the other children consolidate their feeling of belonging to the
black community, so that they will not turn into “dicty niggers.”
maternal figure, Carrie resembles Hetty Daniels, Angela’s mammy in Fauset’s
Plum Bun: both Carrie and Hetty are symbolic barometers for the main
protagonist’s consciousness in time of inner crisis.
However, there is a major difference between the two characters. If Fauset’s
de-sexualized heroine suits the mammy stereotype, Shange rethinks the mammy
stereotype and sexualizes her protagonist, who not only takes care of the
household chores, but also likes “entertainin’ gentlemen callers.”
importantly, Carrie’s guiding role assists Betsey in her most challenging
self-assertion. It is Carrie—the black illiterate—who prompts Betsey to use
the power of literacy in order to demonstrate the danger of adopting a white
literary canon. In the same way in which Carrie physically fought another
woman, so Betsey can mentally fight the white teacher who banished the
blacks to another country and denied them national status, sustaining
that “being colored meant you couldn’t write poems or books or anything”
(183). When Betsey’s remarks—“nobody listens to me cause it’s just another
nigger talking out the sides of her mouth”—Carrie advises her to stand up
for herself using the very word meant to diminish her (183). Carrie’s advice
circles back to Dunbar’s poem, the emblematic refrain of the novel: “Speak
up, Ike, an’ ‘spress yo’se’f.”
conclusion, by relating her main protagonist’s destiny with a number of
prominent female figures, Shange’s novel creates a polytropic character
whose liberating adventure subverts the patriarchal and racist system. Like
Harper and Fauset, Shange makes use of the specific tropes of black
sentimental romance, whose pattern she revises in accordance with actual
priorities. The author preserves accordingly the major concerns with
domestic setting and heroic quest, and correlates them with contemporary
social and feminist issues.
attention to identity as a literary construct to be disentangled from
stereotypical representations, Betsey Brown is as a powerful example
of authorial struggle to liberate the black self from racist ideology.
Shange thus demonstrates that African American literature is shaped by a
range of social contexts that determine the emergence or disappearance of
narrative types. The African American character emblematically becomes part
of a dynamic process that operates cultural revision and change.
- Birnbaum, Michele.
“Racial Hysteria: Female Pathology and Race Politics in Frances Harper’s
Iola Leroy and W. D. Howell’s An Imperative Duty.”
33. 1 (Spring 1999): 7-24.
- Blain, Virginia, Isobel
Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature
in English. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990.
- Boesenberg, Eva. Gender-Voice-Vernacular: The Formation
of Female Subjectivity in Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice
Walker. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 1999.
- Campbell, Jane.
Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
- Chopin, Kate. The
Awakening and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Cooke, Michael G.
Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of
Intimacy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984.
- Cudjoe, Selwyn R. “Maya Angelou: The Autobiographical
Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology.
Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990. 272-306.
Fauset, Jessie Redmond. Plum Bun. A Novel Without a Moral. 1929.
Introduction by Deborah McDowell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
- Foreman, Gabrielle.
“Looking Back from Zora, or Talking Out Both Sides My Mouth for Those Who
Have Two Ears.” Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990):
- Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth.
“My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.”
Reading Black, Reading Feminist. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York:
Meridian, 1990. 176-203.
- Hale, Anthony.
“Nanny/Mammy: Comparing Lady Gregory and Jessie Fauset.” Cultural Studies
15.1 (2001): 161-72.
- Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. Iola Leroy. 1892. 2nd
ed. Philadelphia: Garrigues Brothers, 1893.
- Heller, Dana A. The Feminization of the Quest Romance.
Radical Departures. Austin: University of Texas, 1990.
- Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Hard Road to
Freedom: The Story of African America. New Brunswick, New Jersey and
London: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
- Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
1937. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
- Jacobs, Harriet.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1987.
Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories. Ed.
with an Introduction by Alison Easton. London: Penguin, 1995.
- LeSeur, Geta. “From Nice
Colored Girl to Womanist: An Exploration of Development in Ntozake Shange’s
Writings.” Language and Literature in the African American Imagination.
Ed. Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay. Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood
Press, 1992. 167-80.
- Lester, Neal A. “At the
Heart of Shange’s Feminism: An Interview.” Black American Literature
Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990): 717-31.
McDowell, Deborah E. “Regulating Midwives:
Introduction to Jessie Redmond Fauset’s Plum Bun. A Novel Without a Moral.”
Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. ix-xxxiii.
- Morrison, Toni.
Beloved. 1987. London: Vintage, 1997.
- Shange, Ntozake.
Betsey Brown. London: Methuen, 1985.
- Slotkin, Richard.
Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,
1600-1860. Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
- Tate, Claudia. Black
Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.
-----, “Allegories of
Black Female Desire; or, Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives
of Black Female Authority.” Changing Our Own Worlds: Essays on Criticism,
Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl Wall. New Brunswick and
London: Rutgers University Press, 1991. 98-126.
- Thoreau, Henry David.
Walden or Life in the Woods. 1854. Walden and
Resistance to Civil Government. 2nd ed. Ed. William Rossi.
New York and London: Norton, 1992. 1-225.
- Turner, Victor.
Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. New
York: Ithaca, 1974.
- Willis, Susan.
Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison,
Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Another similarity between the three novels
consists in their lack of critical attention. Thrown to the literary
dustbin as “sentimental fiction,” Harper and especially Fauset are
frequently overlooked. It seems that their fate is shared by
Shange’s novel, a text about which very few academic papers have
In “Allegories of Black Female Desire,”
Claudia Tate makes the distinction between the black male and female
sentimental texts. In the black male romance, the marriage plot has
the role to support “the dominant racial discourse of protesting
social injustice;” in black female romance, the marriage plot is
central, as “these narratives not only culminate in marriage; they
also idealize the formation of the family unit” (1991, 105-6).
Even after the end of slavery, its
long-lasting effects made men see black women as sexual objects or
“mules of the world” good only for hard work
(Hurston 1990, 14). In spite of
this social drama, literature provided almost no plot about
aggressed black women. In 1940, when Richard Wright wrote Native
Son, the American scene was swept by hysteria over the
vulnerable image of the white woman, whose body was thought to be a
desirable target for black men. There was no fuss about molesting
black women. Alarmed by this literary absence, Wright’s goal was to
draw attention to the black female abused body, and he introduced in
Native Son the subplot of Bessie’s rape. From a new
perspective, thirty years later, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice
Walker, and Gayl Jones explored the effects of physical and mental
violence upon black women, especially rape and incest. Their
fictional universe is haunted by poverty, violence, and loss,
disclosing how the strongest social cell—the family—has been
affected and could not normally function. The plot focused on the
rape of a black female that was underdetermined in Wright’s time is
now overstressed. Unlike in slavery, when the violator was the white
man, now the criminal becomes the black man. All these contemporary
narratives rewrite again and again the ancient myth of Philomela
described by Ovid as physically and mentally maimed. In some
instances, Philomela speaks. This is the case of Walker’s Celie
or of Angelou’s Maya, heroines whose existential growth can fathom
the depth of her inner resources. In other instances, Philomela
remains silent. This happens to Morrison’s Pecola who ends up being
caught in the symbolic cage of a racist mechanism that triggers her
Claudia Tate draws attention to the way in
which African American women’s sentimental narratives “construct,
deconstruct, and reconstruct Victorian gender conventions in order
to designate black female subjectivity as a most potent force in the
advancement of the race.” Tate reads black women’s nineteenth
century sentimental narratives as “feminized mediations of what is
conventionally understood as male power,” so that they can be seen
as “discourses of liberation” (1991, 107).
Jane Campbell shows that the romance
represents “a mode that has qualities appropriate for depicting the
black experience and for enhancing the mythmaking process” (1986,
xi). She also stresses the fact that historical romance has been a
predominantly male genre, since black women’s existence was
circumscribed to the homey, domestic sphere. Quoting Tate,
Campbell points out that the existential movement of female
characters is often restricted by family responsibilities so that
they have to “conduct [their] quest within close boundaries, often
within a room” (Tate 1983, 185, in Campbell 1986, xi).
Richard Slotkin points to “the myth of
regeneration through violence” and the myth of “the heroic quest” as
essential components underlying American cultural mythology (1973,
In this sense, the epigraph of the novel
sets its tone, by juxtaposing affective and escapist images:”&
this is for the man who chases butterflies/ & alcoholics in latin
night club dreams/ & kisses me with zoom lenses on the beaches/ of
the Hollywood Freeway/ all the hibiscus bloom as you devour iguanas/
& and this is for the men who loved me &/ the one I love/ & and the
child who is a mirror” (Jessica Hagedorn, “Something about You”).
The novel echoes Thoreau’s famous comment:
“Men labor under a mistake… Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the
teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or nigh; does any
divinity stir within him?… The mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation” (1992, 3-4).
A striking comparison can be established
between this episode and Sarah Orne Jewett’s story, “The White
Heron,” as in both cases the huge, fabulous tree represents the
axis mundi, the center from where the female protagonist can
start her initiation. Jewett’s Sylvia (aged nine) resembles Shange’s
Betsey (aged thirteen) not only because both girls are inexperienced
characters young in years, but also because both manifest
contemplative skills. In spite of the temporal and spatial
differences, Sylvia’s and Betsey’s propensity to explore the world
from above, choosing nature’s peaceful shelter over the noisy,
industrial American cityscape, initiates a significant quest. Again,
for both heroines, the quest takes place on a vertical, not
horizontal axis, the pine tree (for Sylvia) or the oak tree (for
Betsey) giving them access to the spiritual.
Pondering this “halo of romance,” Michele
Birnbaum observes that “Harper's novel, until most recently, has
been neglected in part because her characters seemed too brilliantly
lit, too idealized in the name of racial service (1999, 14).
The rime representing the epigraph of the
novel is significant in this sense: “To market, to Market/ To
buy a Plum Bun;/ Home again, Home again,/ Market is done.”
As McDowell notices, the motto suggests that
“the unfulfilled expectations of the speaker in the nursery rhyme
stands in ironic contrast to the foiled expectations of Angela
Murray” (1990, xvi).
Like Just as Mr. Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening, Roger offers Angela material comfort, but no
real understanding. Even if Angela gives in to Roger, “something
quite outside herself, something watchful, proud, remote from the
passion and rapture which flamed within her, kept her free and
independent. She would not accept money. She would not move to the
apartment on Seventy-Seven Street; she still refused gifts so
ornate that they were practically bribes” (1990, 204).
Hence, the tension between what Victor
Turner calls “communitas,” (the relationship through which Betsey
can be placed on an equal position with the other individuals), and
“structure” (the system that obliges Betsey to obey the moral
imperatives of her society (1974, 47)).
Selwyn Cudjoe remarks the importance of
names for African Americans: “The inviolability of the
Afro-American’s personhood is so closely guarded that any assault or
presumed assault upon his/her person is violently resisted” (1990,
Geta LeSeur affirms that Ntozake Shange’s
women “must learn to relate to and separate themselves from the men
in their lives” (1992, 167).
One of the traps into which the Harlem
intellectuals fell was imitating the elitist model of the white
people. These African Americans earned the epithet “dicty niggers,”
a term that characterized those belonging to Harlem’s upper class.
It is during this last stage of the Renaissance that they realized
their mistake of mimicking white values. The result was both a
separation of African Americans from American culture and a turning
toward the African past.
Anthony Hale observes that “Daniels serves
as Angela’s ‘racial consciousness’ as the youthful heroine
transgresses forbidden racial boundaries in search of a life free of
economic and racial oppression” (2001, 167).