(Download) "Just Git the Womenfolks to Working at It: The Construction of Black Masculinity in Go Down, Moses (Critical Essay)" by Atenea # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Just Git the Womenfolks to Working at It: The Construction of Black Masculinity in Go Down, Moses (Critical Essay)
- Author : Atenea
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 91 KB
Description
Go Down, Moses (1940) is a novel about men. From the enigmatic Isaac McCaslin to the unnamed mulatto son of "Delta Autumn," the novel concerns itself with the way masculine subjects encounter the Southern world from the time of slavery to Jim Crow. In many ways, the men in the novel are not born, but made. Isaac's complicated understanding of his relationship to nature, history, and property is undeniably connected to his conception of what it is to be a man (Davis). As gender theorists such as Judith Butler have argued, gender identity is largely performative, with the characteristics of masculinity or femininity changing according to arbitrary, but communally agreed upon, definitions. Faulknerian scholars have investigated masculinity in Go Down, Moses by analyzing the particular characteristics that "make a man" in the world of the novel (Brooks, Martin). However, as much as white masculinity is a societal construct, black masculinity is even more predicated on outside influences. As Thadious Davis argues in Games of Property, the laws of the South during the novel's time frame were designed to deny black slaves, and later black citizens, status as persons. Largely, this negation took the form of categorizing black people as either animals or children, incapable of mature human emotion (Davis 16). A way for black people to challenge this contemptuous assumption was to assert themselves as heterosexual beings. This pattern explains Tomey's Turl's radical courtship of Tennie and Lucas Beauchamp's refusal to accept a divorce from Molly. In order for black men to create an identity independent from racist assumptions, they must conform to a gendered identity that establishes them as mature sexual beings or married men under white law. Black masculinity therefore depends upon black femininity to define itself through and against. The major black male figures in the novel, from Tomey's Turl to Samuel Beauchamp, follow this paradigm. However, Davis does not explore the consequences that this definition of masculinity exacts on the stability of identity for both black men and women. Any conception of gender that relies upon outside forces is inherently unstable. This is especially the case with black masculinity in the novel. In his chapter discussing Go Down, Moses, Cleanth Brooks focuses on the different male characters' attempts to prove their honor. For Isaac, the struggle involves repudiating his exploitative ancestry, and for Lucas, asserting himself against Zack even in the face of possible lynching. Though Brooks realizes that "the virtues of the two men are rather different and even stand in contradiction" (253), he does not connect this contradiction to the way the two construct their masculinity. Women, black or white, are largely missing from Brooks's discussion, aside from brief treatments of Molly and Isaac's wife. Whereas for the white men in Go Down, Moses marriage is a secondary consideration for masculinity formation behind property ownership and hunting, black men for the most part are excluded from legally owning property or participating fully in the homosocial world of the hunt. Sam Fathers is an exception to this generalization, but his brand of primal masculinity is not feasible in the modern world. Therefore, black men must rely upon sexual, and to a lesser degree, maternal, relationships to black women as the sole entry into societal legitimacy; their entire sense of personal and communal identity is reduced to familial relationships, and later marriage. The construction of black masculinity relies upon the presence of a black female body, unavailable to white appropriation. Because this domestic placement of the black female body is so crucial, gender roles in the novel become hierarchical. Black masculinity asserts itself through the reification of traditional gender roles. The consequences of this construction are twofold. First, black women in the novel become subsumed by their responsibilities to prov
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