Kara Ireland
Dr. Brown-Spiers
AMST 6401
April 27, 2022
Are Y’all Forreal?: Black Women in Fiction
On the first page of Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks greets the reader and states that “that which appeared dead but was merely dormant is beginning to grow again” (17). I take this sentiment to introduce my ideas and my paper. To this, I venture to claim that the image of the Black woman appears dead, but was merely dormant and is beginning to grow again. The waters nurturing this growth stemmed from various Black Feminist authors and Black women who are committed to taking control of their own narrative, who are committed to resisting and correcting ignorance of their identities. This too is my role. According to hooks, “irrespective of our access to material privilege we are all wounded by white supremacy, racism, sexism, and a capitalist economic system that dooms us collectively to an underclass position,” however, acknowledging injustice does not also mean we must agree and resign to be victims (20). The rhetorical appeal and characterization of the Black woman has historically been adjacent to struggle, resilience, and pain. Turning a critical eye to the passive roles and the uninvested descriptions of Black women is one of the first steps I want to take to redefine our narrative.
In this paper, I will scrutinize the Black women characters in William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Toni Morrison’s Paradise against the Black women characters in HBO’s Insecure and Amazon Prime Video’s Harlem for variations in dynamic attributes of character. I will be focusing on how the image and narrative of the Black woman is constructed in fiction, with emphasis on the ethos of the various authors or creators. I am arguing in favor of well-rounded Black women characters as evidenced by Insecure and Harlem instead of characters that endorse and perpetuate pre-existing ideasar about Black women as evidenced in Clotel and Paradise.
As someone who graduated college as an English major, I have read a lot of literature that is uninvested and irresponsible in their depictions of Black women. As a result, I have encountered a lot of distress when reading insensitive, racist fiction (highly indicative of our realities) assigned by professors who did not care to address racial complexities, only what was endorsed by the white literary canon. Considering my role as a Black student at a predominantly white institution, many of my concerns were briefly entertained or dismissed altogether. My anxieties and discomforts about reading unaffirming depictions of Black people (Black women in particular) in my classes were not seen as relevant course discussion in a predominantly white class with predominantly white professors. But as hooks suggests, “healing occurs through testimony,” and when my experiences and the experiences of others misalign with the dominant narratives about us, it’s time to speak up (26.)
Black Women in the Male Gaze
William Wells Brown’s Clotel has a restrictive imagination of the lives Black women ought to lead. Of course, when assessing a wide range of stories, it is crucial to be conscious of the rhetorical situations in which they were created. Being published in 1853, Clotel is revolutionary in numerous ways, but its accolades do not prevent it from criticism. While some see the Mulatto category as a race wholly different from Black, I do not; Brown wrote the character Clotel as a form of a Black woman, which indeed she is. Nonetheless, her prescriptions to white femininity and purity juxtapose her from the Black enslaved women surrounding her. In her introduction, Clotel is referenced as “the beautiful slave” while the others are “the less valuable slaves,” and this distinction is repeated in various ways throughout the book (Brown 17). As Angelyn Mitchell illuminates, “Brown employs Clotel as "the archetype of the beautiful heroine whose mixed blood, noble spirit, and poetic nature make her a tragic figure,” … thus, Brown introduces the theme of the tragic mulatto to the African-American literary tradition” (9). By this mode of introduction, Brown has already begun to separate Black women (simply referred to as “servants” or “Negress” throughout) and Mulatto women by beauty, agency, and relevancy.
Novels like Clotel are very important to the advancement of Black art but can simultaneously be harmful to women. In fact, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) has highlighted this exact plight in their statement: “We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism” (19). This is a valuable insight because the CRC was a collective of straight and lesbian Black feminists; they advocated for the rights of Black women specifically because they were rendered invisible in the mainstream feminist and civil rights movements, while also being subjected to intercommunity racism and sexism. I broach this topic because Brown perpetuates sexist mentality by making Clotel’s greatest virtue her looks, inviting other characters and potential readers to dehumanize and objectify her.
Brown was balancing several topics within the narrative arc of Clotel, including slavery, Christian hypocrisy, colorism, and romance, so it may be an unfair critique on my part to condemn his depiction of Black women; even in this acknowledgment, I remain steadfast in my assertions that the responsibility of a writer is to tell a multifaceted story and to be cognizant of all angles. Here is the relevancy of the maxim “write what you know,” and although Brown knows slavery and its children well, it appears that he does not know Black women enough to write about them. His reductive, sexist descriptions of Clotel, which mostly only emphasized her physical appearance and docile nature, are indicative of his maleness and role in the patriarchy. Although her beauty was central to the plot, it was not the only asset that made her a commodity to others, but those other qualities were decidedly less important. Writing a woman from the male gaze often shows up in sexist, over descriptive ways, but Brown’s only attributions to Clotel were in her beautiful looks.
Adjacency to beauty and worthiness seem to be central to Brown’s mode of storytelling, and I believe there is significant rhetorical power in the fact that the only women that have names are the Mulatto characters. Attributions of beauty and grace are given to Clotel and Currer, but the other enslaved women are hardly referenced save calls of “Negress” (which only appears twice in the text). Even in a book named after a Black woman protagonist, Black women are still relegated to the background of the text and are made invisible amidst the story. According to Mitchell, “the major difficulty with his treatment of females in Clotel lies in its reductiveness, i.e., its tendency to reduce the female characters merely to symbols of oppression” (11). In my introduction, I made the point that Black women are adjacent to struggle, resilience, and pain—as if we are supposed to derive strength and pride from these harmful narratives. I am skeptical about this approach because it seems like harm reduction at best, since “many black people see themselves solely as victims with no capacity to shape and determine their own destiny” as a result of these ongoing, pervasive prescriptions (hooks 20). Brown’s employment of Black women characters posits them as foils for the more fortunate Mulatto characters, the enslaved men, and the white women surrounding them.
I do not wish to suggest that there is no struggle associated with Black women; there is, and it is largely due to systemic structures. The impact of systemic oppression cannot be ignored for how it affects the lives of Black people everywhere, but that is why “the Combahee River Collective (CRC) employed [a] dynamic approach to politics, not a reductive analysis that implied identity alone was enough to overcome the sharp differences imposed by social class in our society” (Taylor 11). My goal is to identify the failings of how Black women characters were constructed in order to hopefully liberate the Black woman from being synonymous with struggle.
Taking Control: Positive Depictions by Black Women
Amazon Prime Video’s Harlem is an incredible vantage point for the positive and realistic characterization of Black women. Written by Tracy Oliver, a Black woman herself, Harlem prioritizes Black women as the main characters of the show while also emphasizing that Blackness is not monolithic; the friend group features Black women of various appearances, personalities, nuances, backgrounds, and identities. As evidenced in many a plot, in print or on screen, “Black women… are overrepresented in the most dismal categories used to measure the quality of life in the United States” (Taylor 12). Harlem smashes the box Black women are so often confined to by featuring Camille, a Ph.D. decorated college professor, Quinn, an entrepreneur and businesswoman, Tye, the founder of a technology company, and Angie, an aspiring singer and actress.
Each of these women are fallible, emotional, celebrated, liberated, and affirmed throughout the show, which is honorable, because it seems as though Black women are either representative of struggle or resilience; Harlem depicts them as nuanced individuals capable of a full range of emotion and experience. It values the sentiment that struggle is a part of these women’s experiences without defining them or limiting their aspirations; it also demonstrates that struggle wears many faces. “Much of the celebrated fiction by black women writers is concerned with identifying our pain and imaginatively constructing maps for healing,” and by virtue of validating the wide-ranging experience of Black women, Harlem succeeds in providing healing for the Black woman’s image (hooks 21).
Another show that honors the struggles imposed on a Black woman character while also giving her a well-rounded personality is HBO’s Insecure. Issa, the main character, and her best friend, Molly, are two dark-skinned Black women that juxtapose one another in terms of success and relationships. I mention their skin tone because usually, dark-skinned women representation is only fit for caricaturized roles that recycle dominant, deviant assumptions; yet these two women are not reminiscent of the Mammy, Jezebel, or Sapphire caricatures. Issa Rae, the creator, pioneered the Awkward Black Girl movement, which, at its core, does not appear to be all that compelling. However, when compared against historical depictions of Black women, socially awkward, silly, and softspoken characters are almost virtually unheard of. They are tropes that do not fit neatly within the Black woman stereotypes, and thus is not replicated in media as much.
According to Rae in an interview, “at a time when we had these Black-led series that featured women who were political masterminds or high-powered record executives, it felt like a revolution just to create a TV show about average Black millennials” (Filkenflik). Insecure follows the trials and tribulations of 20-something Issa Dee, who is habitually navigating platonic and romantic relationships, her career, and her own self-confidence. In watching, I saw some reflections of myself and my experiences in Issa, and it was then that I realized how rarely audiences get to see Black women characters admit to insecurity, pain, and feeling lost. Such things are only implied. Like Brown’s depiction, they are silenced symbols of oppression without also being humanized and able to articulate their lamentations. When comparing the two, I realized how the CRC’s simple wish of “[being] recognized as human, levelly human” remains a hopeful wish (19).
Two Sides to a Coin
While I am advocating for more Black women to write their own stories, I should address and deny the idea that ethos is all it takes to correct the detriments already done. Another quippy maxim “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk” comes to mind when I entertain the idea that this will be fixed simply by letting Black women write more characters. That is a dense, nearsighted solution to a pervasive problem. Blackness alone does not expose anyone to the nuances of a whole identity, and neither does womanness; they are each only one facet of Black women’s identity (evidenced by Brown, who is Black but still created a subpar character). Here, I will analyze Toni Morrison’s Paradise against my own claims that Black women should control their own narratives; what happens when Black authors contribute to the controlling images? How is it different?
Similarly to my experience reading Clotel and longing for Black women characters to have nuance, I read Morrison’s Paradise and discovered another way oppression can be built into a character without fully exploring it. Mavis is a nuanced character that can be described as passive, anxious, and introspective. In my reading, she is the embodiment of trauma and neglect as she attempts to navigate failures as a wife, mother, and woman overall (with proximity to motherhood and wifehood defining her ideas of woman). She longs for more but asks for little. Stereotypes rarely come from nothing, and ideas that Black women are docile and submissive come from observations of them behaving that way, either by force or resignation. By the time we meet her, Mavis has escaped her abusive husband, Frank, while mourning the death of her infant twins, Merle and Pearl; it is left up to one’s imagination to conjure up the other tiny horrors she has endured to contort her into such a shell of a woman. Considering Morrison’s identity as a Black woman, I have different analytical views of her contributions to lowly Black women characters. I believe that Morrison has created a character like this because she has interacted with Black women like Mavis, where her characterization is not prescriptive but descriptive.
I want to reiterate again that it is not bad practice to shed light on oppression, abuse, or trauma–but rather that when the group’s image is saturated with those negative messages, it can be hard to see a full image. The way Morrison has written Mavis’ chapter from the third-person omniscient narration grants the reader insight to her thoughts and allows glimpses of her past. In what the text provides, Mavis’ past is riddled with verbal and sexual abuse, neglect, and discontentment; it makes sense that Mavis has started to internalize those insults. For example, when she made a mistake, she heard Frank’s vitriolic remarks affirming that “she was the dumbest bitch on the planet” (Morrison 37). When her babies die in a hot car, her guilt transforms into recurring anxieties that her other children and her husband are intent on murdering her. Her paranoia and low self-esteem may strike some readers as crazy, but Mikki Kendall offers an alternative perspective: “Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that we women used to struggle against our oppression” (17). Perhaps Mavis’ demeanor was in response to living under an abusive husband in a household not born out of love (no offense to her other children). The psychological pressure Mavis is under to be a good wife and a good mother, then failing must have had extremely harmful results on her.
Although her chapter is brief, Mavis undergoes a transformation that delivers her from her anxiety-ridden lifestyle when she escapes Frank and encounters the Convent. As she meets other Black women there who are self-assured, independent, and content, she learns how to create those realities for herself. Her bold decisions to steal his Cadillac and disappear to California evidences her first personal insights of autonomy and audacity, then she learned how to make less impulsive decisions. Escaping Frank, who is representative of patriarchal oppression, is simultaneously her first glimpse at happiness in a long time, as she describes a tender moment from her childhood “Now, in flight to California, the memory of the Rocket ride and its rush were with her at will” (Morrison 28).
When Connie describes the Convent saying “scary things not always outside. Most scary things is inside,” I thought it was a metaphor for the plight of Black women overall (Morrison 39). I thought about the heavy burdens and dormant traumas many Black women must carry with them internally because there are no available outlets for her. This is why my heart aches for the recently constructed Strong Black Woman, because she is constantly revered and rarely deserving of empathy.
Controlling Images, Stereotypes, and Reclamation
The same racist, sexist, and heteronormative structures that created the struggling Black woman stereotypes are responsible for the newfound “Strong Black Woman (Who Don’t Need No Man).” It functions in the adjacent ways that deprive the fictional Black woman of her humanity by making her unnaturally independent and strong-willed, tough and self-assured—ultimately superhuman and more capable of enduring abuse. Even with more seemingly “positive” attributes, these stereotypes and controlling images fail to generate a whole image of the Black woman; they are merely playing tug-of-war with two extremes. This sarcastic excerpt from Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism highlights the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of those who try to create a Black woman character:
“Their lived experiences are immaterial and can be dismissed as merely anecdotal. Make it clear that you are not racist or sexist, you are merely concerned about their plight … Marriage, children, lack of either, too much education, not enough education, welfare, whatever you think will sell. It only matters that you highlight their troublesome natures. … If you are speaking of Black mothers, make it clear that they need guidance, financial support, or salvation. What salvation? Well, that all depends on whether they work too little and thus are on welfare, or work too much and thus are neglecting their children. There is no point at which they can balance work and family, because, again, they are Other and that is not possible for them” (134).
Kendall hit the nail on the head in that snarky how-to guide, and she’s right to be snarky, because the tropes are overdone to the point that it bleeds into Black women’s personal lives beyond the screen.
The effect of this assumption is just as damaging as the former. Evelyn White reports that “more than 50 percent of black women live in a state of emotional distress” … This will surprise few black women, who are daily assaulted by institutionalized structures of domination that have as one of their central agendas undermining our capacity to experience well-being” (hooks 23). This assertion from Kendall supplements that statement: “merely naming the pejorative stereotypes attributed to black women (e.g., Mami, matriarch, Saphire, whore, bull dagger), let alone cataloging the cruel, often murderous, treatment we receive, indicates how little value has been placed upon our lives during for centuries of bondage in the western hemisphere” (18). Again, I will never deny the pain and hardship inflicted on Black women by virtue of being Black and women in the white supremacist patriarchy, but we are so much more than this. We have to be. Media depictions of Black women should honor those modes of systemic oppression while also giving us the dignity to live full-fledged lives despite it. We cannot always be created as the victim others are designed to pity or ignore.
In the writing room, Black women characters have been lazily constructed in harmful, reductive manners that contribute to their subhuman perception societally. As the CRC reported in 1974, “no one before has ever examined the multi layered texture of black women’s lives,” and it is evident in these knee-jerk over corrective models (Taylor 18). That is why I believe Harlem and Insecure are wonderful, refreshing shows that humanize Black women and depict them as multifaceted individuals. It sounds silly that this is my qualification of a “wonderful show” (the bar is in hell!), but it’s reminiscent of Rae’s observation that “we don't get to … just have a show about regular Black people being basic” (Filkenflik). With the surge of Black women writers and creators, there is finally a shift taking place that seeks to humanize Black women through their characterization and narrative arc.
Conclusion
The ethos of the creator is often a tertiary issue (coming after the content of the plot, the kairos of its release, its accolades and reception, etc). I wanted to bring ethos to the forefront of my discussion because I wanted to get to the root of where Black women’s depictions went wrong and who is perpetuating them. As scholars, we are often called to question and deconstruct the rhetorical content of media, but sometimes the content is a cultural reflection of the author. In the white literary cannon, most texts are unconcerned with their depictions of minorities since they are only coloring in the background of the protagonist. First, I’m tasked with arguing that these secondary characters should be handled more intentionally before I get to argue how they are presented.
I close with a beautiful sentiment from Audre Lorde,
“Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a simplistic insistence that “Black is beautiful.” It goes beyond and deeper than the surface appreciation of Black beauty, although that is certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to reclaim ourselves and each other remains there, then we accept another superficial measurement of self, one superimposed upon the old one and almost as damaging, since it pauses at the superficial” (145).
Defining ourselves as the antithesis of something is still giving the original meaning power. Instead, we must strive to define ourselves anew. Tracy Oliver and Issa Rae give me hope for the future.
Works Cited
Brown, William Wells, Clotel. Penguin Classics, 2003.
Cooper, Brittney. Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
Filkenflik, David. “HBO’s ‘Insecure’ Soars by Staying True to Its Revolutionary Mission.” Weekend All Things Considered, Oct. 2021. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=edsglr&AN=edsglr.A681159869&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Hill-Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2013.
hooks, bell. Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. Routledge, 2014.
Kendall, Mikki. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women a Movement Forgot. Viking, 2020.
Mitchell, Angelyn. “Her Side of His Story: A Feminist Analysis of Two Nineteenth-Century Antebellum Novels—William Wells Brown’s ‘Clotel’ and Harriet E. Wilson’s ‘Our Nig.’” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, vol. 24, no. 3, University of Illinois Press, 1992, pp. 7–21, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27746501.
Morrison, Toni. Paradise. Vintage International, 1998.
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2013.