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

Such resistance to romance is especially evident in the double-marriage plot, for Du Bois denies this central device of reconciliation romances. As Nina Silber has thoroughly shown, North-South marriages came to stand for national reunion, while nuptial vows between pairs of siblings avoided the awkward gendering of sections. Too often, however, such tropes ignored the failure of Reconstruction, and so Du Bois depicts his cross-sectional marriages as flawed, oppressive unions. Harry is a" 'nasty brute!'" (354) and Taylor a "scrawny iron man" (197). While Helen Cresswell lies languidly bored, Mary Taylor loses a child, martyrs herself to the randy Harry, and finally wishes in her domestic misery for the "reality and prose of life" (287). All is foreshadowed in the wedding ceremony where "either bridegroom looked gladly at the flow of his sister's garments and almost darkly at his bride's" (231), suggesting that incestuous, sectional interest enforces their conjugal bonds. Harry aptly proves this fact, and when his courting becomes a seduction, Du Bois debunks the cavalier hero of so many Southern romances. Harry's "'aristocratic pose and pretensions'" charm the innocent Mary (180), but "gentlemanly as he was by rule of his clan... underneath raged unappeased fires" (196). Clan is hardly a neutral word, especially in the context of "unappeased fires," and the message rings clear when Harry admits he had acted "too cavalierly" (311). We are thus not surprised by Harry's debauches or Colonel Cresswell's relation to Emma. In fact, the patrician Cresswell line may have a drop of black blood.(3)

Keith Byerman also suggests Du Bois's critique of Southern romance, but the author's irony takes political force when coupled with his censure of Booker T. Washington and the Southern pursuit of Northern capital, particularly in Tooms, where we see a hellish picture of New Slavery in the New South. Taylor explains how he will use his monopoly to "'club European manufacturers into submission'" (64). With a twist of Washington's famous speech from the Atlanta Exposition, he describes his Northern cotton trust as "'the whip-hand of the industrial world'" (111). Moreover, the Cresswells learn from Taylor that "'the code of the Southern gentleman won't work in Wall Street'" (192), while at the same time workers, some of them children, suffer the hardships of the mill. A white woman declares, "'Durned if I don't think these white slaves and black slaves had ought ter git together'" (395) - not only emphasizing Du Bois's point that Northern industry had mastered the South, but challenging a popular political strategy Taylor explicitly names: "'We'll... use whites to keep niggers in their place, and the fear of niggers to keep the poorer whites in theirs'" (391). By setting Southern agrarian interests against the industry of the New South, Du Bois lays bare the ideological rifts in a politically regressive alliance that combined Southern racism with Northern exploitation - an alliance that Washington hoped to join with the promise of Southern black labor. Du Bois also hints (though with serious misgivings) at fusing poor whites with blacks - a powerful coalition in the hey-day of Populism that attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to make class a political base. Du Bois, in his novel, as in his life, is unsure about working-class whites. Thus he defends black political power by pitting Cresswell's Southern Democrats against Taylor's Northern Republicans, for minority interests in a two-party system gain leverage from party strife. Or, as the powerful Mr. Easterly explains, "'In a close election the Negroes ... choose the President'" (266).(4)