Domestic violence in the Harlem Renaissance: remaking the record in Nella Larsen's Passing and Toni Morrison's Jazz

African American Review, Spring, 2004 by Stephen Knadler

Before mapping out the specific codes of these narratives of domestic violence, I want finally to note how this discourse on gender violence represents a shift from earlier beliefs, particularly within the dominant society (Donat and D'Emilio). Nineteenth-century Americans tended to perceive the wife batterer and his victim in moral (as opposed to psychological or legal) terms, as someone who had broken his patriarchal responsibility to his family and lost the self-control and judgment necessary to the middle-class male character. Since rape and spousal abuse were seen as problems between individuals and not connected with one's experience as a gendered, raced, or classed subject, battered or raped women were often viewed as fallen women, or damaged property. While beginning in the 1870s Societies to Protect Children from Cruelty (SPCCs) started to extend their concern to battered wives, they began with a model of the perpetrator of domestic violence as a flawed moral character or as a tragic figure of intemperance (Hatten 122). Amidst the Progressive era reforms of the early twentieth century, however, most major cities began to establish courts of domestic relations headed by case workers who sought to decriminalize family violence and to offer a curative rather than a moralistic or punitive approach. (6) With the increasing influence of psychoanalysis, these therapeutic interpretations of abuse in the 1920s and '30s, as Elizabeth Peck argues, started to take a "more sustained inquiry into the victim's complicity in causing abuse" (146). Although the therapeutic approach to family violence no longer classified battered or raped wives as fallen women, they increasingly looked at what they saw as the natural psychology and sexuality of men and women in ways that often re-established old stereotypes that attributed abuse to the sexual, biological, and psychological problems of women. Therapeutic case workers frequently suspected the victims of abuse of being masochists, lying hysterics, or nagging shrews. While the black popular press did not employ a complicated psychological grammar, these news stories tended as well to displace the causes of domestic violence from the sociological to the psychological, and, by doing so, helped to constitute emergent models of modern female psychology for the black community.

While certainly the scandalous stories of domestic violence in the New York Age and Amsterdam News lacked the diagnostic complexity of clinical understandings of "wife battering," they too, I would argue, tried to "normalize" perpetrators and victims within a rudimentary psychological grammar. While most women who committed some kind of "domestic violence" were not condemned as moral transgressors against middle-class norms of "true womanhood," (7) they were now seen as unstable women who had "lost control" (most often due to problems within their own nature). Almost uniformly the sole explanation given for the woman's resort to violence was the single psychological motive of jealousy. Such individualist explanations of abuse were, of course, on the one hand, victim-blaming, but in fact the weeklies" stories often invoked the universalist language of great classical tragedy (such as Shakespeare's Othello) to ennoble the woman who let her passions for her man overpower her reason. As the Amsterdam News announced in the lead paragraph of its front-page story of November 28, 1928, "Jealousy Goaded Wife Stabs Rival to Death in a Row": "Jealousy, the green-eyed monster, claimed another victim Monday morning in the stabbing to death of Maud Gary, 35, 305 West 138th Street." In its account, the News states no other motive and seeks to provide no additional background. It is enough to label this violent outburst another illustration of the "natural" uncontrollable jealousy of black women.