What Else But Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison - Review

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by William R. Nash

Philip Weinstein. The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 237 pp. $42.00 cloth/$15.50 paper.

Reviewed by

William R. Nash Middlebury College

Philip Weinstein enters the ongoing debate over literary interpretations and constructions of racial identity with this ambitious work, in which he attempts a cross-cultural assessment of Faulkner's and Morrison's treatment of racial identity formation. Other critics have devoted entire works to either Faulkner's or Morrison's understanding and use of race and racial relations in their fiction. One thinks, for example, of Thadious Davis's Faulkner's Negro: Art and the Southern Context (1983) and Trudier Harris's Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), to which Weinstein refers frequently. Weinstein, whose main argument stresses how race and gender affect both literary creation and interpretation, adds his wrote Southern male perspective to this discussion, and raises provocative questions about Faulkner and Morrison and their works.

In Part One, "Beginnings," Weinstein discusses his relationship with Ms. Van Price, the African American domestic worker employed by his family throughout his pre-Civil Rights era Memphis childhood. Explaining how his encounter with "Vannie" shaped his racial consciousness, he goes on to consider the formative impact of Caroline Barr on Faulkner and compares his childhood experience to his subject's. Weinstein uses both Price and Barr to examine Faulkner's domestic black women characters, most notably Dilsey Gibson of The Sound and the Fury. He argues an autobiographical connection between Barr and Gibson, suggesting that Barr "crucially affect" Faulkner's developing racial identity, and he subsequently claims that Gibson functions as a negative image to Faulkner's most dysfunctional white mother, Mrs. Compson of The Sound and the Fury.

Weinstein establishes this relationship between white mistress and black domestic to illustrate the racial dynamic that shaped Faulkner's experiences and his fiction. He moves from there to consider Pauline Breedlove of The Bluest Eye and Ondine of Tar Baby, arguing that Morrison explores the same relationship from her othered position and uses it to illustrate the harm domestic work does to African American womanhood. After discussing Tar Baby he makes several general claims about Morrison's mother figures. Although Weinstein acknowledges that "a full-scale reading of Morrison's black mother is outside the scope of this discussion," he attempts to address each mother figure in Morrison's entire canon and therefore treats none of them in sufficient detail, which weakens the impact of his argument.

The second chapter, "Historical Beginnings: Slavery," addresses Faulkner's and Morrison's treatment of slavery. Weinstein opens the chapter with a clear reading of The Unvanquished, a lesser text that he argues tells us much about how Faulkner understood the impact of slavery on race, class, and gender relationships in the nineteenth-century South. From The Unvanquished he moves to Absalom, Absalom!, which he reads convincingly as a chronicle of "the collapse of white racist patriarchy." Having established Faulkner's position, Weinstein considers Song of Solomon, claiming that Morrison shows how the horror of slavery is "still living a century later in the beleaguered psyches" of the Dead family. He explores Morrison's recovery of the past through her characters and, building on this idea, turns to Beloved, in which Morrison "represents slavery," he says, "through the capacity of her black characters to register, conceptually and emotionally, slavery's penetration of their very marrow." The strength of this chapter lies in the close juxtaposition of these texts, as Weinstein shows how each author's race, gender, and historical context influences their reconstructions of the historical record.

This first section of the text, although admirable in its attempt to address the complex societal questions at work in the Southern racial environment Weinstein describes, inadvertently perpetuates the same injustice it seeks to resolve. Weinstein tells of his family's love for "Vannie" and recounts one of her notable dialect aphorisms to illustrate her wisdom: "About a drunken black man who once bartended at a family party and claimed not to have touched a drop, she declared: 'He sho do stagger sober' - a phrase that has taken on family immortality." Weinstein's presentation of Ms. Price makes this reader uncomfortable, which seems to be his intent, as he explains the societal constructs shaping his childlike interpretation of her role in his family. However, having accounted for the assumptions presented in his first descriptions, Weinstein maintains his initial tone and language throughout the work.

Most troubling is his consistent reference to Price as "Vannie" and to Barr as "Mammy Callie." Although he stresses his great respect for Ms. Price and the importance Faulkner placed on Ms. Barr's role in his life, Weinstein consistently denies these women the dignity of their own names. More generally, there is a lingering element of paternalism in the description of Ms. Price that weakens his position; this is, perhaps, most evident in his account of his twin brother's acting as one of Ms. Price's pallbearers, usurping the position of one of her male relatives, because "she had been neither mammy nor mother (she had no children of her own) to anyone else there." Weinstein's discussion of these details, along with his dramatic revelation of Ms. Price's racially mixed ancestry, which he suggests accounted for her "ability to hold her own in any encounter," indicates that his understanding of racial dynamics has not progressed so far as he alleges.