To be suddenly White: Realism and the problem of agency in United States passing narratives

Steven J Belluscio, Purdue University

Abstract

Chapter one provides a historical and critical overview of passing and the three ethnic groups discussed in the dissertation: African Americans, Italian Americans, and Jewish Americans. Chapter two offers readings of Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty—both of which are taken to be early examples of realist passing narratives. The chapter concludes that—vis-à-vis Howells's own standards for realism—Harper's text succeeds politically, if not always aesthetically, in ways Howells's text does not. Chapter three focuses upon “white ethnic” male-centered texts, first distinguishing between acculturation narratives (by Abraham Cahan, Giuseppe Cautela, and Garibaldi LaPolla) and passing narratives, and then providing readings of two passing narratives (by Ludwig Lewisohn and Guido d'Agostino). In the final analysis, passing is viewed as not only a cultural violation, but in some ways, a biological impossibility—a testament to the racialism of many European/American immigrant narratives. Chapter four traces the history of the male-centered African/American passing narrative from 1899 to 1931. The texts written in this time period—by Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and George Schuyler—reveal a greater tendency than their “white ethnic”-authored counterparts to critique race as an idea and to employ irony, even full-blown satire, as a weapon against harmful racial ideologies. Chapter five examines the trope of passing in ethnic female-centered narratives by Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, and Helen Barolini. In each, the complicating factor of female gender is part and parcel of the protagonists' passing strategies and the problematic agency they suggest. Also in these texts, passing is rejected either as an unstated impossibility or as culturally undesirable. Chapter six concludes the study by tracing the palpable move toward modernism found in African/American female-centered passing narratives published between 1899 and 1929 by Chesnutt, Walter White, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Beginning with the melodramatic realism of the 1890s and moving to the purer social realism of the 1920s, and then, finally, to the near-existential modernism of Passing (1929), it becomes clear that the explicitly stated determinisms of race and gender create the need for less traditional modes of representation.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lamb, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature|Minority & ethnic groups|Sociology

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