The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860 - Reviews - Book Review

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Nina Baym

Linda M. Grasso. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 184 pp. $49.95 cloth/$18.95 paper.

In this study of literature by black and white American women writers before the Civil War, Linda Grasso rejects the focus on domestic ideology that she thinks has dominated feminist literary criticism and history, in favor of what she calls a paradigm of anger. To read for anger, she holds, is to illuminate "an unrecognized tradition in American literature." Anger is "a mode of analysis" in which one looks for the presence of anger in a text. It is also "the basis of an aesthetic" in which one studies the strategies through which women give literary expression to anger. In her introduction Grasso connects this approach to 1970s feminist projects wherein anger was central: consciousness raised by making women aware of how justifiably angry they were, solidarity built by recognizing the shared conditions that had made them angry, and oppressive institutions productively attacked by channeling this anger into political activism. Grasso believes that what held for women in the 1970s was true for the antebellum e ra, although differences in historical and cultural circumstances produced different modes of expression. She suggests that feminists today, having lost touch with this redemptive anger, have lost something valuable. But, reminding readers that the earliest group of 1970s feminists were all white, and that this group was roundly attacked by black feminists coming to voice at the same moment, she wants to avoid the mistakes of that era by giving equal weight to black and white women's voices.

Beginning with an introduction that locates her project within a tradition of feminist scholarship, Grasso next offers two general chapters about antebellum women's anger. She theorizes that women's anger is an ethical response to oppression and injustice, although it requires clarification and proper direction if it is to serve the common good. Her historical thesis is that the antebellum nation-an abstraction that rationalized the power and convictions of white middle-class males--established a gendered ideology of anger. The righteous anger admittedly necessary for nation-building belonged to men, while women were not only denied the right to express anger, but even the capacity to feel it. As a result, women who did express anger were perceived as animals or lunatics. Denying women the right to be angry, as well as the right to articulate it, helped keep them second-class citizens. Accordingly, women who recognized and expressed anger constructively were claiming the right to be citizens. But expressing a nger acceptably was a difficult undertaking. Women writers developed an artistry of indirection, dissembling, splitting, masking, and coding to get their anger out into the public sphere.

After laying out this provocative scheme, which is enhanced by discussion of writers such as Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Emily Dickinson, Mary Boykin Chestnut, and others, Grasso develops four fine chapters of analysis centered on two pairings of white and black texts: Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok and diverse writings by Maria W. Stewart from the 1820s, Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig from the 1850s. In each chapter, thoughtful close reading is augmented by an impressive range of relevant cultural materials along with references to other literary works. The coverage of secondary materials is excellent. This is a richly considered contribution; each chapter is strong. The overarching thesis is that each woman reconciles the tensions between concealing and expressing anger by writing (here Grasso borrows the title of a novella by Louisa May Alcott) from "behind a mask." And, "between the lines and behind their masks," all propose "an alternative vision of Ameri ca as homeland, criticize economic, gender, and race relations, and express anger about the woman writer's unequal status. Their masked political critiques are profound acts of transgression, resistance, and inventiveness in a culture that does not allow women a full range of expression.

As this extract makes clear, Grasso has a romantic belief in self-expression as a human right along with a conviction that people are basically good. From this standpoint, although she declines to assess works for their literary value, she certainly judges their moral worth. A degree of confusion enters her analysis: Anger is bad if it focuses on the wrong target. It is acceptable for black women to be angry at white women, but all anger of white against black women is either purely selfish (as when white women object to sassy servants) or is a defensive deflection from the true oppressor (the libertine spouse, rather than his victim). Moreover, she tends to see white women's narratives as ultimately capitulating to the advantages of membership in the middle class. Women protagonists too often let go of their anger prematurely, when their narrow personal objectives are attained, long before a just social world has come into existence. The "best" women, white and black, are those whose anger focuses on slavery and racism. Grasso's chapter on Our Nig, for example, contrasts the fantasy of transformation and reconciliation found in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall with the tragic bleakness of "Nig's" story in a way that makes Wilson's work clearly superior to the others. For Grasso, ultimately, racial justice supercedes anger as her leading category of analysis, a point that she should probably have underscored more than she does. Although The Artistry of Anger is not itself an angry book, it is fueled by a sense of the wrongs done by American society to its black citizens. The study takes its place as one among a growing number of similar works by white people in which the energies and ideals of the Civil Rights Movement are carried forward into literary scholarship.