QUEUC (Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference)

I just got back from a wonderful weekend at Bishop's University.  It was the first annual undergraduate conference for English literature students in Quebec (QUEUC).  I went with five other students from Université Laval to present a paper on Frederick Douglass (see a summary at my blogpost here).  There were a large range of topics presented from students from Concordia, McGill, U. of Montreal, U. of Sherbrooke, as well as from Bishop's. Of course there were the standard Shakespeare papers read, but also works from more obscure authors.  As there were 55 presenters, I did not have the opportunity to hear all the papers, but those I did were excellent.  The conference was divided into 14 panels separated thematically.  The panel I was apart of was entitled "Patriarchy, Parenting, and Personas."  There was a comparison of the use of blues music in Langston Hughes' poem "The Weary Blues" with bebop in Jack Kerouac's San Francisco Blues.  Having read both Hughes and Kerouac this semester in my American novel class, her exploration of how music was central to their poetry was interesting.

The other three presentations were by students from Bishop's who commented upon Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard: A Novel (Delta Fiction).  The first presenter reviewed the role of patriarchy in the life of the main character, Janie, of Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Janie is a young black woman who had been raised by her grandmother.  After being "put on the marriage auction block" at the age of sixteen by her grandmother, she reluctantly marries Logan, an older man.  He expects her to do heavy work on his farm, seeing her more as a farmhand than a wife, so she runs off with Jody.  Once again she finds herself in a patriarchal relationship; Jody, the newly elected town mayor, wants her to be a trophy wife.  After being widowed, she falls in love with a vagabond, "Tea Cake" and finally finds an equal, although imperfect, marriage.

The second applied the framework of feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow to both Hurston's and Vonnegut's novels.  Based on Freud's Oedipus Complex, Chodorow expands the theory so that for both girls and boys the mother is the first love.  Hence, for males, the love for the mother is therefore replaced by the love for the wife, but for women, they can never truly love a man, so their love for the mother is replaced by the love of a child.  The presenter then revealed the how this theory was upheld in the novels and also how it was unreliable.

Lastly, the third of these presentations concerned autobiography's importance in the novel.  In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrative is orally transmitted to the protagonist's best friend, Pheoby, whereas Vonnegut writes Bluebeard as the fictional autobiography of the fictional painter, Rabo Karabekian.  In Bluebeard the writing style is affected as he experiences the events he writes about.  The presentation explored the differences in style and influence that these fictional "pretending to be" autobiographies had.

   

One of the other students from Laval spoke about murder in Hamlet and MacBeth.  The other four students from Laval spoke on American works.  Jonathan considered the change of Henry Fleming's identity throughout Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage.  Simon revealed how "Ragged Dick" denied his true selfhood while pursing American Dream in Horatio Alger's children's book Ragged Dick.  And Jenny spoke on Nathaniel Hawthorn's transcendental tendencies (rather than the common Puritan beliefs of his era) in his own life and in his novel The Scarlet Letter.  Lastly Kathleen used PowerPoint slides to show Jacob Riis' influence on modern-day photojournalism, especially through his work How the Other Half Lives (referring to the poor of New York City).

   

Although, as you can tell, it was a very intellectual weekend (Jenny called it the most intellectual weekend in her life), we had soooo much fun!  It was great getting to know each other better.

Colour Discourse

I've just finished another essay dealing with racial issues in the United States, this one for my 20th Century American Novel class. In fact, I haven't even turned it in yet! Here's the introduction and some of the main points. Of course, if you'd like to read it all, let me know.


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When O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995 the media focused on the contrasting reactions of Blacks and Whites. The opinions of other racial groups were not actively sought (Enomoto 146). Similarly, societal debates surrounding Michael Jackson in the last decade of his life questioned whether his very pale skin colour overrode his African ancestry. These contemporary examples illustrate the historic tendency of Americans to identify people according to the binaries of White and Black, and this based on skin colour. Historically, pseudo-scientific racism, propagated by eugenicists, categorized people into the dualities of the desirable White and the undesirable Black, in an effort to ward off the reversal of the evolutionary process through racial intermarriage. Similarly, the “one-drop rule” adopted by eighteen states between 1910 and 1931 reinforced the dualistic categorization of people since it determined the legal definition of “Black” to include anyone with at least one drop of African blood (Herring 129). Because of these racist concerns, Whites enacted Jim Crow laws to segregate Blacks from Whites in hopes to reduce the births of interracial children.

During the 1920s, in an era when eugenicist’s arguments, Jim Crow laws, and one-drop rules were commonly accepted, a strong emphasis was thus placed on skin colour as both Blacks and Whites appropriated racist rhetoric that deemed light skin tones and European features to be more desirable than dark skin tones and African features. Two novels from this era, Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, which takes place in 1910 and was published in 1930, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, set in the Roaring Twenties and published in 1925, reveal this preference for lighter skin tones in both Black and White communities. Through the inclusion of a panoply of skin tones in his novel, Hughes critiques racial binaries and also the intraracial schisms brought on by the preference in the Black community for lighter skin, while the characters in Fitzgerald’s novel are described on the more limited colour scale of white, tan, brown and golden revealing the characters’ acceptance of eugenic arguments for the conservation of the pure Nordic race.

Through the use of colours, Hughes critiques the prejudice within the Black community which considers lighter-skinned Blacks, the “high-toned” or “yellow” skinned, as more sexually and socially desirable. This stereotype creates racial divisions among Blacks. One reason for this intraracial prejudice is that light skin refers to a white ancestry which connects the light-skinned to the dominate culture and people of the United States. Blacks that hold this view accept the power structure created and upheld by Whites in which Whites are superior to all other races. This racist ideology claims that pale skin and European facial structures are beautiful and all others are undesirable (Fanon 183). The novel’s protagonist, Sandy, appropriates this aesthetic, identifying the Africans in his geography book as “ugly” (175). That other Blacks in the novel, besides Sandy, have also appropriated the ideology of considering whiteness as more attractive than dark-skinned complexions is evident. For example, at the jazz club, black girls are told to “stay where [they] are” while “[h]igh yellers” and “brown-skins” are beckoned to “draw nigh” and to “come near” (100). Obviously, the women are being divided into the sexually attractive light-skinned and the undesirable dark-skinned. Sandy’s teenaged aunt, Harriet, wants to be among the sexually desirable as she powders her face and neck which gives the impression of “pink on ebony,” before going to a barbeque with teenage boys (57). Men, too, try to be whiter to appear sexually attractive, such as the stranger Sandy meets in Chicago whose face is powdered with white talcum.

In The Great Gatsby, Whites idolize a standard of whiteness which is different from that of the Blacks in Hughes’ novel. Fitzgerald’s characters base their scale on the supposed perfection of the Teutonic physical features of the Nordic nations. Miscegenation is therefore conceived as a threat to the conservation of this pure Nordic race. The ideal Aryan body would be blond, blue-eyed and tall (Stoddard xiv), in short the embodiment of Fitzgerald’s character Tom Buchanan. It is thus noteworthy that it is he who voices the racist opinion that Whites and Blacks should not marry. His theory is based on the writings of eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, which Buchanan, in ignorance, or by the narrator’s mis-remembering, identifies as Henry H. Goddard. Both Stoddard and Goddard advocated scientific racism, dividing races along the scale from the most evolved White to the least evolved Black, including the races of Yellow, Brown, and Red in between the two extremes. The United States, with its influx of immigrants, was thus a battleground for the conservation of the Nordic race. As Madison Grant writes in the introduction to Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,

Democratic ideals among an homogeneous population of Nordic blood, as in England or America, is one thing, but it is quite another for the white man to share his blood with, or intrust (sic) his ideals to, brown, yellow, black, or red men. This is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly will be the white man himself. (xxxii)

Through the influence of these men, Buchanan warns his white friends of the threat of the downfall of modern civilization occasioned by the pure race being submerged by the “colored empires,” a grouping which includes the inferior White races of southern and eastern Europe (13).

At each recounting of Buchanan’s racist views, his companions mock them, such as when his wife tells Nick, in Tom’s presence, that she and her friend Jordan passed a “white childhood” together in Louisville or assures Tom that she and Nick were talking about the Nordic race during Tom’s absence (19). Nick, as narrator, treats Tom’s views as “gibberish,” and is tempted to laugh aloud at Tom’s ignorance, but neither he nor any other of Tom’s acquaintances openly confront Tom’s racist rhetoric (130). In fact, they have internalized it without vocalizing it. The Whites live in “white palaces,” wear white clothing, and powder their white skin in the attempt to convey racial purity (5). The desire of Whites to reflect a pure whiteness is based on the eugenicist Stoddard’s insistence on three races of White peoples, of which the Nordics were the most evolved. People hailing from the Mediterranean regions, including the Republic of Ireland, or from southeastern Europe were considered less sexually and sociably desirable, as well as being less intelligent (Stoddard xiii-xiv). Although Gatsby is white, Tom does not consider him to be of the pure race because he is of the working class and is descended from ambiguous European ancestry. Gatsby’s “brown,” “tanned” skin is a testament to his years as a sailor on Lake Superior and also excludes him from the purer white skinned of the leisured upper class (98). Tom’s contempt for Gatsby as an inferior White is evident in his consideration of a relationship between Daisy and Gatsby to be comparable to “intermarriage between black and white” (130).

Racist preferences of lighter skin tones are evident in both Not Without Laughter and The Great Gatsby, yet Hughes’ inclusion criticizes the practice, while Fitzgerald upholds it. Hughes’ unflattering portrayal of Tempy and her snobbish attitude toward her family and other dark-skinned poor Blacks, whom she considers “niggerish,” (158), reveal that haughty attitudes based on skin tone divide a community already oppressed in American society. Fitzgerald’s characters mirror Fitzgerald’s own questioning of eugenics. During his undergraduate degree at Princeton eugenics theories were “palpably in the air,” mainly due to the teachings of biology professor Edwin G. Conklin (Bender 225). Like his character Tom Buchanan, Fitzgerald seemingly embraced Nordicism, writing to Edmund Wilson four years before the publication of Gatsby, that Americans should “[r]aise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo Saxons and Celts to enter” (Fitzgerald 47). However, Buchanan’s views are dismissed by the other characters, revealing Fitzgerald’s own uneasiness with the claims of eugenics. Rather, Fitzgerald’s concern with the “rising tide of the colored empires” is disclosed in Nick’s apprehension of the presence of Blacks and “inferior” Whites on the bridge crossing to New York City, a city where “anything can happen [...] [e]ven Gatsby” (69). Americans had to choose in the opening decades of the 1900s, and presently have to choose, if racism will continue to segregate a nation based on the colour, and more appropriately, the shade of colour, of the skin of its citizens.

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