Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Maurice Lee

As Arnold Rampersad best shows, The Silver Fleece has elements of realism. Du Bois once called it "an economic study" (Dusk 751); Norris's unfinished Epic of the Wheat may have been influential (Rampersad 117); politics and Wall Street, mills and monopolies, exploitation and graft - all reflect fears of late-industrial capitalism and the incorporation of life. Bles says," Death and pain pay for all good things'" (127). Zora despairs, "'God! it was money, money, always money'" (359). By rejecting Bles's "Quixotic ideas" (315), Caroline Wynn tragically chooses salary over romance, whereupon Tom Teerswell calls her" 'Carrie!'" (322), recalling another materialistic Carrie, who wins riches but not love. We should also anticipate The Financier (1912) in Du Bois's chapter "The Cotton corner," for just as Dreiser represents fate as a "horrific spider spinning his trap" (501), Du Bois imagines that "away to the north a great spider sat weaving his web" (193). Moreover, in Norris's Octopus (1901), a town is "sucked white" by a railroad system that Norris describes as "a giant parasite fattening upon [its] life-blood" (289). In Tooms, the Taylor cotton mill seems to "devour" employees with "its black maw open, drawing in the pale white mites, sucking their blood and spewing them out paler and ever paler" (391).

Like Norris and (for the most part) Dreiser, Du Bois bemoans the relentless materialism his novel sets in play; but unlike them, he does not depict a world of grim determinism. Bles and Zora are joyfully engaged; Smith's school is saved by a happy inheritance; the "free community" Zora founds survives its white attackers (362). For all the text's economic savvy, capitalism does not conquer love. For all the forces that buffet Bles, he remains "A Master of Fate" (312). This ultimately makes political sense, for as a reformer who, like Zora, exhorts his people to "'free yourselves!'" (370), Du Bois rejects the ruthless law propounded by Norris and Dreiser. In the wrong hands (and there were many), social Darwinism led to political quiescence and theories of black inferiority (Degler). Norris's racism is painfully obvious; Dreiser's fatalism is so profound he describes Herbert Spencer as "liberal" (Sister 87). Though Du Bois, at times, speaks highly of Spencer - Zora even has one of his books on her shelf - he clearly rejects the racist claims often construed from Spencer's thought. Thus Harry Cresswell callously notes that life is "'a case of crush or get crushed'" (116), while the foolish sociologist Temple Bocombe flatly states, "'Race is undoubtedly dying out'" after glancing at some black children's heads (179).

"The Way" for Zora and Du Bois is not this implacable path, and yet the author of The Silver Fleece is also no romancer. Bocombe is engrossed by a novel he calls" 'clever, but not true to life'" (174). Cresswell prefers a light romance to Jane Addams's Newer Meals of Peace (1906). Even the pairing of Bles and Zora, the romantic core of the book, resists convention when Bles rejects the "innocent," "sweet and good" Emma (418). Except for her race, Emma could star in any number of white romances; as a sexually pure, light-skinned black, she might pass for Harper's Iola Leroy or Hopkins's Dianthe Lusk. The younger Bles is surely influenced by such sentimental models: After learning of Zora's notorious past, he thunders, "'You should have died!'" (170). But Zora endures, Bles learns better, and the fallen woman wins her man. In fact, by redeeming Zora's purity, Du Bois envisions a happy ending few romancers would dare.