Domestic epic warfare in Maud Martha

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Valerie Frazier

Early critical analyses of Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks's sole novel, either dismissed it as an unsuccessful fiction and/or viewed it as a mere extension of Brooks's lyrical poetry. Those early critics, often in reviews of less than a single page, lauded the novel's "quiet charm and sparkling delicacy of tone" (Winslow 16) but didn't remark the anger and tension below the narrative surface. More recent criticism has centered on the undercurrents of rage and rebellion of the protagonist, Maud Martha Brown. This rage seethes beneath the surface of the novel's 34 vignettes of the seemingly common, everyday life experiences of a black woman living in the south side of Chicago in the 1940s. The shift in critical perspectives of the novel, then, is markedly different across generations. As Mary Helen Washington asserts in "'Taming All that Anger Down': Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha": "In 1953 no one seemed prepared to call Maud Martha a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred and the silence that results from suppressed anger. No one recognized it as a novel dealing with the very sexism and racism that these reviews enshrined. What the reviewers saw as exquisite lyricism was actually the truncated stuttering of a woman whose rage makes her literally unable to speak" (453). Washington's watershed article is one of the first to acknowledge the protagonist's anger and internal revolt as Brooks weaves them into the tapestry of the novel; Washington recognizes a systematic pattern of suppressed rage and fury throughout the work.

Further sharpening the focus on one particular narrative conflict in Maud Martha, Harry B. Shaw explores the title character's "War with Beauty," as he subtitles a landmark essay, rendering militaristic the dark-skinned black woman protagonist's fight against Eurocentric paradigms of physical appearance. Shaw's essay delineates the effects of this biased, color-conscious system on Maud's psyche, and emphasizes its role in spawning internal battles with self-hatred and self-doubt (255-56).

While I agree with Washington's and Shaw's arguments regarding the psychological battles faced by Brooks's protagonist, I also find that the conflicts and turmoil that encapsulate Maud Martha's life coalesce into a comprehensive pattern of domestic epic warfare. This domestic epic warfare extends beyond Shaw's "war on beauty" and incorporates all areas of household and familial ties. Domestic warfare precisely describes Maud Martha's struggles to obtain and maintain her home and relationships with family members as she strives to retain a sense of identity within this confining structure.

Maud Martha captures the conventional literary epic's spirit of battle by encapsulating the metaphorical representations of domestic warfare as female epic with Maud Martha as the hero of her home/land. Like with traditional epic, Maud Martha emblematizes the cultural paradigms of a critical moment in history, revealing the struggles of post-World War II America to reconcile the roles of women, in particular African American women, within the public and private realms. Through the course of the novel, Maud Martha fights a war against sexism, classism, and racism to establish her identity. Winning this war is of paramount importance and of epic heroic dimensions because at stake for Maud Martha, as representative woman, are home and family, as well as autonomy, creativity, and self-expression.

Particularly during the early 1950s, the time in which Maud Martha was written and set, the domestic realm was one of tension and flux as women worked to balance their roles as wives, mothers, and artists. With World Wars I and II only recently past, and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts on the horizon, (white) women workers found their roles in society changing. (1) They had entered the US workforce during the wartime era, providing the nation with a much-needed source of labor. Yet after the war, the return of their male counterparts forced working (white) women's return to the domicile and to domestic duties. The post-war decades of the 1950s and 60s also brought on the Red Scare--a crazed fear of worldwide domination by Communism. In reaction to these uncertain times, the nation placed increasing emphasis on maintaining the sanctity of the home. Elaine Tyler May reads this "containment ideology" as a defense in the wake of potential dangers of the Cold War and nuclear conflict (10-11). The US patriarchy mandated that women of all ethnic identities symbolize domesticity and concentrate their energies on the home.

To combat and counteract these scripts of domesticity, in Maud Martha Brooks encapsulates a distinctly feminine pattern of metaphoric warfare that destabilizes patriarchal and societal structures, and asserts the primacy of new visions of feminine growth and creative expression. To construct her epic of domestic warfare, Brooks employs such narrative strategies as encoded meanings within names, shifts in narrative voice, and conflations of birth and death imagery; thus, she subverts and redefines traditional definitions of domesticity, of marriage, and of motherhood. Significantly, for Brooks, these institutions become sites of both agency and complicity for women. She complicates the realm of the domestic beyond a sphere of binary and competing gender functions to critique the roles of men and women in creating and maintaining the social structures that limit female growth and to critique how race, class, and gender inform the relative perspectives of the heroine.