Living Lessons: The Evolving Racial Norm in the Novels of Anne Tyler

Southern Quarterly, Fall 2005 by Elfenbein, Anna Shannon

In a distinguished literary career that has spanned four decades, Anne Tyler has published sixteen novels in which she chronicles the domestic crises and concerns of characters living in the South.. Few of those characters are black.1 Yet Tyler's black characters and the relationships between them and her white characters perform thematic functions that make them important and memorable. In an essay published in this journal in 1992, Alice Hall Petty canvassed the black characters in the novels published between 1964 and 1988 and identified the purposes they served.2 The present article, which focuses upon the six novels Tyler published between 1988 and 2004, examines the ways in which her depictions of black characters and white-black relationships have evolved since the period considered by Petry. This examination discovers in five of Tyler's later novels-Breathing Lessons (1988), which won a Pulitzer Prize, Saint Maybe (1991), Ladder of Years (1995), A Patchwork Planet (1998), and Back When We Were Grownups (2001)-a predominant racial norm that differs markedly from the norm evident in her earlier works. In these later works Tyler implicitly endorses ideals of racial equality, integration, and harmony that she did not so clearly embrace in her earlier novels and thereby teaches her readers an unexpected series of lessons on how to live in a racially diverse society.

Alongside this important shift there is also a degree of continuity between the racial norm of Tyler's earlier novels and that of her later ones. Thus, both groups of novels contain some black characters whose attitudes and behavior toward whites have been shaped by white racism and are consequently marked by alienation, resentment, contempt, anger, or aggression. Such attitudes and behavior, which are evident in Searching for Caleb ( 1976), Breathing Lessons (1988), and The Amateur Marriage (2004), imply that racism poses an ongoing threat to the achievement of racial harmony and thus serve to qualify Tyler's generally optimistic view of racial relations.

In Tyler's later novels the predominant racial theme is the proposition that equality and harmony between the races are not only desirable but achievable, and her suggestion that white racism may impede progress in that direction sounds a discordant minor theme. In this article I briefly discuss the minor theme first and then move on to a more extensive discussion of the major one.

In the early novels in which both white and black characters appear-If Morning Ever Comes (1964), The Tin Can Tree (1965), A Slipping-Down Life (1970), The Clock Winder (1972), Searching for Caleb (1976), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), and The Accidental Tourist (1985)-almost all of the interracial relationships are marked by social distance. Many of the white families in these novels define themselves in part by taking pride in their racial and ethnic heritage and by judging outsiders harshly. An example is the wealthy Peck family in Searching for Caleb, some of whose members believe themselves to be superior to everyone they meet. Whether they own a home in affluent Roland Park, as do the Pecks, or rent one in a working-class neighborhood, as do the Tulls of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, some of the white characters in Tyler's early novels also exhibit the toxic effects of what Adrienne Rich has called "white solipsism," an insidious malady that causes them "to think, imagine, and speak as if whiteness described the world" (21, reprint 299). This racist affliction blinds these characters to the humanity of black people.

Most of the black characters in the early novels are employed as domestics in white households and thus occupy a status below that of the white characters. As Barbara Johnson has said, some of these blacks are invisible to their employers despite being in plain sight, like Poe's "purloined letter" (267). In Searching for Caleb, for example, the white solipsism of Caleb Peck's parents blinds them to the realization that if they were to ask Sulie Boudrault, their black cook, and her husband Lafleur, who is also black, they might be able to find out where Caleb was going on the morning he disappeared. "They don't reckon just old us would know nothing," says Lafleur (235).

In the early novels, as Petry has pointed out, some of Tyler's black characters function as "repositories of good sense and emotional stability" and of various other qualities the white characters "should possess" (9, 8). And when black families appear in these novels, they represent a norm of harmonious family life that contrasts sharply with the norm of dysfunctionality represented by the white families. As an example, Petry cites If Morning Ever Comes, Tyler's first novel, in which her white protagonist, Ben Joe Hawkes, shares a train car with several black families while returning to his North Carolina home from New York. Whereas the Hawkes family sends "no one to greet. . . Ben Joe . . . at the train station," the Hayes family, which is black, "is welcomed home by 'a dusty black Chevrolet... stuffed with laughing brown faces, piled three deep'" (Petry 8). By using her black characters to perform this contrastive function in her early works, Tyler relegated them to a separate and inferior status.2