For various reasons, the average, struggling, nonmorbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America. His revelation to the public is the thing needed to do away with that feeling of difference which inspires fear and which ever expresses itself in dislike.

—Zora Neale Hurston, "What White Publishers Won't Print"

We must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each other's difference to enrich our vision and our joint struggles.

—Audre Lorde, "Age, Race, Class, and Sex"

When pondered together, these meditations on difference raise some perplexing questions. How do we discover a shared humanity without erasing difference? How do we use difference to enrich our vision if we fear it? How can we come to understand difference differently? When Zora Neale Hurston wrote "What White Publishers Won't Print" in 1950 before the civil rights movement began, she believed literature could help reduce white prejudice by proving blacks to be "just like everybody else." When Audre Lorde called for new patterns of relating across differences at Amherst College in 1980, she ended her powerful plea with lines from an unpublished poem, "we seek beyond history / for a new and more possible meaning," lines that suggest the power and importance of imaginative literature in producing change. Currently Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writing when racism is once again on the rise, continues to insist on the power of language to shape perception: "Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference … we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. To do so is to engage in a pernicious act of language, one which exacerbates the complex problem of cultural or ethnic difference, rather than to assuage it or redress it." Several contemporary Southern novelists are attempting to assuage and redress this complex problem in their fiction, to deal with difference in the way Audre Lorde calls for. I am limiting my discussion to two novels written by Southern women after it was obvious that desegregation, in and of itself, would not eliminate prejudice—Meridian (1976), by Alice Walker, and A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), by Gail Godwin. I am interested in the literary techniques they employ to dismantle the stereotypes of Southern womanhood produced by the patriarchy of the Old South—stereotypes that persisted after the Civil War ended slavery and after the civil rights movement ended legal segregation. Both Walker and Godwin imagine shared experiences for their black and white characters, calling attention not only to their common interests and common humanity but also to other similarities that the South's preoccupation with racial differences overshadowed: gender and class. Walker and Godwin do not attempt to erase difference so much as to assure that difference is not misread or misnamed, to show that it is not biologically determined but culturally conditioned.

Recognition of any similarities between black and white women has been rendered difficult in the South by a history of slavery and segregation, which caused blacks and whites to define themselves in opposition to each other, to see difference as innate rather than socially constructed. Though not representative of the majority of Southerners, the white plantation society, because of its economic and social dominance, established conventions of behavior for women, both white and black. The white woman was expected to be a "lady"—physically pure, socially correct, culturally refined, and dutiful to family. Lower-class white women were less-refined, more hardworking versions of this same ideal of the dutiful wife. In contrast, plantation society defined black women as promiscuous wenches, prolific breeders, hardworking mules, or nurturing mammies. Irving H. Bartlett and C. Glenn Cambor contend that "each image was paradoxical and something far less than that of a mature, autonomous, and well-integrated woman." The white "lady" was deprived of her full sexual and maternal identity while the black woman was deprived of her equality and her humanity. Literary critic Minrose Gwin argues that "just as black women were forced to be strong, white southern women often were compelled to appear weak." Even though these racial stereotypes were inaccurate, as historians Catherine Clinton, Paula Giddings, and Anne Firor Scott have shown, they have affected black and white women's images of themselves as well as their images of each other. Psychologist Mark Snyder has observed the power of stereotypes to become self-fulfilling: "In interracial encounters, racial stereotypes may constrain behavior in ways to cause both blacks and whites to behave in accordance with those stereotypes." He also points out that when people have adopted stereotypical ways of thinking about another person, they "tend to notice and remember the ways in which that person seems to fit the stereotype while resisting evidence that contradicts the stereotype."

The difficulty of realizing that racial differences are socially constructed rather than biologically determined is evident from the following passage of Mary Chestnut's Civil War diary. An aristocratic white woman, Chestnut can see the brutality of slavery, but the ideology of plantation society blinds her to the fact that it is the system that degrades the female slave, rather than the female slave who is naturally inferior:

Under slavery we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can't name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children…. My disgust sometimes is boiling over. Thank God for my country women, but also for the men! They are probably no worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses the more degraded they must be.

Such reasoning, the literary critic Hazel Carby argues, was part of the nineteenth-century ideology of Southern womanhood, which held that the white man was "merely prey to the rampant sexuality of his female slaves." This dichotomous thinking shows not only that stereotypes falsify the causes of behavior but that they are also used to bolster self-esteem.

For years white women have defined themselves in opposition to their black sisters, but black women have done the same. One hundred years after Chestnut confessed these strong feelings. Toni Morrison wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine rightly questioning the relevance of the women's liberation movement for black women and proudly affirming her identity as a black woman by delineating the differences between the races. She reminisces about a trip to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was struck by the "accuracy and fine distinctions" of the labels "White Ladies" and "Colored Women" on bathroom doors: "The difference between white and black females seemed to me an eminently satisfactory one. White females were ladies, said the sign maker, worthy of respect. And the quality that made ladyhood worthy? Softness, willingness to let others do their labor and their thinking. Colored females, on the other hand, were women—unworthy of respect because they were tough, capable, independent and immodest." Morrison's perspective allows her to question the ideology of Southern womanhood and to reverse its positive and negative attributes. The following description, however, still bears evidence of stereotypical thinking:

Black women have always considered themselves superior to white women. Not racially superior, just superior in terms of their ability to function healthily in the world…. Black women have no abiding admiration of white women as competent, complete people. Whether vying with them for the few professional slots available to women in general, or moving their dirt from one place to another, they regarded them as willful children, pretty children, but never as real adults capable of handling the real problems of the world.

White women were ignorant of the facts of life—perhaps by choice, perhaps with the assistance of men, but ignorant anyway. They were totally dependent on marriage for male support (emotionally or economically). They confronted their sexuality with furtiveness, complete abandon or repression.

While Morrison emphasizes significant differences in the social experiences of the races, she does not take into account the differences between white individuals, based on other factors such as class.

Throughout this one hundred-year period, some Southern women writers, both black and white, have attempted to undermine racial stereotypes by depicting a common bond between black and white women. In Black and White Women of the Old South Gwin has pointed out that this bond was often based "on an acknowledgement of common womanhood and common humanistic values." This bond, however, was never depicted as one of friendship and equality. Because of the times in which Alice Walker and Gail Godwin live, they are able to push further than their literary foremothers in imagining relationships between black and white women. Each creates a protagonist who discovers not only some similarity but the individuality in a woman of a different race. Then, each becomes better able to understand the other's difference. In Walker's Meridian, a Southern black civil rights worker, Meridian, discovers that a Northern white coworker, Lynne, is not simply a superficial white girl looking for adventure but a hard worker, just as committed to the movement as Meridian is. In Godwin's A Mother and Two Daughters, Lydia, a genteel young white "lady," enrolls in a women's studies class at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and discovers that her black sociology professor, Harvard-graduate Renee, shares her own tastes and interests. The black writer, then, has her black protagonist realize that racial difference is not a matter of simplistic opposition, and the white writer has her white protagonist make the same realization. Thus the struggle that each main character has in overcoming racial stereotypes reflects the struggle that each writer imagines is the experience of readers of her own race. But readers whose race is not the same as the author's also gain knowledge about the complex functioning of racial stereotypes. For example, in reading Meridian many of my white female students were surprised by Meridian's biased opinions about white women, a discovery that made them think differently about themselves and their interactions with black women….

Gail Godwin sets her novel, A Mother and Two Daughters, in North Carolina about fifteen years after the 1960s civil rights movement. Lydia, one of the two daughters of the title, is a 1980s version of the nineteenth-century Southern lady. Graceful, modest, refined, and well-mannered, she has devoted her life to her husband and children. When the novel opens, Lydia fits the stereotype that Godwin described in her 1975 Ms. article, "The Southern Belle": "soft hands and soft voices; first concern for others, not self; refusal to dwell on subjects of ugliness, unpleasantness, violence, tension, strife; suave short-circuiting of all 'embarrassing questions'; cultivation and veneration of traditional and beautiful things; impeccable manners; 'spotless reputation.'" But in fulfilling this role, Lydia has not been fulfilled. To find another self hidden behind the social mask, Lydia leaves her husband and her home and returns to college, where she discovers sociology, feminism, and a black friend, Renee.

Establishing a friendship with Renee plays a central role in Lydia's break with traditional Southern values and in her emerging sense of self, although the interracial friendship is not as prominent in Godwin's novel as it is in Walker's. Lydia's thrill in telling her sister Cate about her new friend comes as much from the fact that Renee is highly educated as from the fact that she is black. Cate, an English professor, has mercilessly criticized Lydia's country-club friends as superficial and her suburban life as trivial. But Lydia considers her new friend as evidence of the reverse—of her widening horizons and of her growing interest in a life of the mind. When she explains the impact her friendship with Renee and Renee's friend Calvin have had on her life, Lydia reveals her previous racial prejudice. She says she used to assume that all robbers and muggers were black and that all victims were white. Now she resents the "bad publicity" that an individual black criminal brings to the race. While Lydia has yet to realize that the "bad publicity" comes not from individual blacks who commit crimes but from whites who see such behavior as a sign of racial inferiority, she is learning that all blacks are not alike by getting to know two black individuals.

In contrast to the relationship between Lynne and Meridian, which emerges after a long struggle, there is little conflict between, or within, Lydia and Renee as they become friends. In part the ease of developing their friendship, despite Lydia's racial prejudice, has to do with their positions in life. Lydia, newly separated from her husband, is eager to prepare for a career; Renee, a Harvard graduate about to have her first book published, has a successful career. So Lydia sees Renec, who is also younger than she is, as a role model, a woman to admire: "Renee's office door was open. She was sitting at her desk, reading an aerogram with an English stamp and smoking a little brown cigar. Framed by shelves full of glossy books and wearing a twill pantsuit with a low-necked cerise silk blouse, she was the advertiser's dream-image of the woman who has 'made it.'" Godwin chooses the details carefully here. They not only reflect the worldly working woman dressed for success but also counter the Southern white stereotype of the black woman. The books, aerogram, and slim cigar indicate that Renee is hardworking, educated, and sophisticated. Lydia is fascinated by Renee because she has never met an upper middle-class black woman. Indeed, Lydia acknowledges Renee's "superiority over her in many of the areas the world values." In this pairing of white and black women, Godwin inverts the traditional Southern racial hierarchy by making the black character superior to the white.

A more significant factor in establishing their friendship as well as in emphasizing similarities between the two women is that their tastes and values are alike, something Lydia discovers when Rence asks her home to lunch. In Renee's home Lydia finds a similarity in tastes: a gray frame house on a "genteel old street," rooms filled with plants and antiques, damask napkins and cut glass. In Renee's conversation Lydia discovers, to their mutual delight, a similarity in interests: French cuisine, sociology, children, the nature of love, the significance of social classes, snobbery. Race is not an issue in their friendship, though social class certainly is. Lydia feels neither hidden guilt, as Walker's Lynne does, nor a desire to confirm liberal views, either of which might cause her, as a white woman, to seek a friendship with Renee because she is black.

Godwin uses the relationship between Lydia's mother's friend Theodora and her black maid, Azalea, as a contrast to the friendship between Lydia and Renee. Godwin underlines the generational change in Southern race relations by juxtaposing Lydia and Renee's lunch with a luncheon Theodora gives the same day. Lydia's mother Nell describes it this way: "'There the three of us sat around the dining table, me and Theodora and Wickie Lee. And Azalea sat in the kitchen having her lunch. Theodora spent most of the time hollering back and forth with Azalea, and Wickie Lee and I sat in silence, picking at our shrimp salad.'" This brief scene depicts both the inequality and the irony of relationships between black maids and their white employers in the South. The conversation between Theodora and Azalea reveals that they have more to talk about than Theodora and her two white friends. When Wickie Lee deserts Theodora, it is Azalea, and not her white friend Nell, whom Theodora goes to for comfort. Yet Godwin makes her readers painfully aware that Theodora's relationship with Azalea is patronizing and self-centered. In giving Azalea her old clothes and jewelry and having her move into the house with her, Theodora appears generous. But such gestures are easy to make; they do not signify friendship, as Azalea understands:

[Theodora] said to Azalea, "The old order changes, Azalea. Why, look at us. Who would ever have thought you and I'd be coughing each other to sleep on the opposite sides of our wall?"

Azalea gave Theodora a level look. "You perfectly capable of winning any argument all by yourself, Miss Thea, but you know and I know there's still that wall." She settled back in her chair with a dark smile, looking for all the world as if she had won.

Unlike Theodora, Lydia is conscious of the racism that still exists in the interracial relationships in Southern society. Thus she is proud of the difference between her relationship with Renee and Theodora's relationship with Azalea. And yet for Lydia, the only embarrassing moments in their friendship come when she is reminded that Renee is black, a difference she no longer thinks about. Godwin indicates that similarities in feminist politics and social class have made Lydia forget about racial difference. But Godwin has Renee remind Lydia of this difference. Renee uses the word nigger in class, and she frequently drops her refined Southern drawing-room drawl and turns on her down-home Southern black dialect. Renee enjoys slipping into black dialect because the use of the two languages allows her to assert both similarity and difference. Lydia can only equate such language with Azalea, and yet at first Lydia cannot equate Renee with Azalea, even though they have the same skin color. However, Renee's continued use of Azalea's language makes Lydia conscious of the difference in skin color and therefore heritage between herself and her friend, at the same time that Lydia has decided there is no difference.

At first Lydia avoids this issue. Seeing class similarities between blacks and whites has allowed her to move beyond racial stereotypes. She does not want to consider racial differences. Eventually Renee's language switch catches Lydia off guard, and she giggles at the contrast. Like Meridian and Lynne, Lydia and Renee end up laughing together. But they indirectly acknowledge difference rather than directly confront it the way Meridian and Lynne do. There is a mannerliness about their relationship that does not exist in the relationship between Lydia and her sister Cate or between Meridian and Lynne. Lydia and Renee's friendship is much like the one Godwin imagines in her essay "The Southern Belle" between a black woman and her white friend who would probably hesitate to ask "embarrassing questions." Lydia remains too much of a polite Southern lady to ask Renee embarrassing questions. However, as Lydia becomes more at ease with difference, she becomes more comfortable with Renee, and she expresses an interest in Renee's family history. Godwin implies that only after black and white Southern women discover some similarities will they be able to begin to understand racial differences, not as innate or uniform, but as variably conditioned by a variety of social and cultural experiences.

Even though Renee may dress and act a part that previously few black women had filled, she transcends any stereotype, white or black, as Lydia's observation shows: "There was something wickedly arrogant about it, when Renee did it [drop into black dialect], as if she were showing her listeners that, though she was equally at home in both worlds, she was actually above both." Godwin does not want readers to mistake Renee for a black woman trying to act white, a mistake Lydia's sister Cate makes when Lydia first tells her about Renee and Calvin. Cate too easily equates their upward mobility with insensitivity to racism and to the plight of their own race. Renee's teaching techniques and her decision to become a civil rights lawyer prove Cate's view false.

In the course of the novel, Godwin Further dismantles racial stereotypes by having Lydia discover that in addition to Renee's having traits Lydia has thought of as "white," Lydia herself has characteristics she has attributed only to blacks. Her marriage to Max has lacked sexual passion, a characteristic she has stereotypically equated with the black race. On a vacation to New Orleans with Max the year before, she had hoped they would be freed from their "tight, civilized" lives by "some Negro playing a saxophone," but "not the faintest throb of the jungle drum beat in their veins." After her separation from Max, Lydia finds sexual passion with a podiatrist named Stanley, but she has difficulty integrating this newly discovered part of her self into the old definition of the Southern lady. To Lydia a lady is not a lover: she is an "amiable bed partner." For a while Lydia tries to compartmentalize her life (mother, student, respected friend of Max, secret lover of Stanley), deciding that if she is a lover in private, she can still be a lady in public. Eventually though, the contents of one compartment of her life spill into another, and she is forced to come to terms with all parts of her self. She discovers that the passion of "the other" is in some respects a repressed part of her self.

In Black and White Women of the Old South, Gwin argues that in the nineteenth century women of both races, bound by dualistic thinking, "often viewed one another as missing pieces of a female identity denied them by the patriarchal culture. Female narrators of the slave narratives reveal their yearning for the chaste respectability of their white sisters, while the diaries and memoirs of the white women show their intense jealousy of the stereotypical sexuality of the slave woman. Each is only one half of a self." In A Mother and Two Daughters, Gail Godwin brings these two halves together in both Lydia and Renee. At the same time that Godwin confers sexuality on Lydia, she gives Renee upper middle-class respectability with all its virtues and flaws. When Renee speaks derisively of the lower class whites who could not appreciate the weimaraner that she bought from them, Renee shows that upper middle-class blacks can be as snobbish as upper middle-class whites.

By the conclusion of A Mother and Two Daughters, Lydia feels in some ways "closer to Renee than to her own sister." As testimony to this friendship, Godwin ends the novel with a symbolic marriage. Lydia's son Leo marries Renee's daughter Camilla, who Cate says is just like Lydia. At first, despite her new racial awareness, Lydia is shocked by the prospect of an interracial marriage in her own family, but she quickly acquiesces when she forces herself to think of Camilla as an individual. For as Carolyn Rhodes has noted, "The concept of the lady in the south of 1984 (the date of the epilog) has been quite detached from concern with color, although not from beauty and grace and demeanor. Camilla, the bride, impresses her white mother-in-law as 'a perfect lady' and the matriarchal Aunt Theodora agrees."

If Gail Godwin's ending seems too pat and idealized, it does not totally depart from realism. In a traditional comedic resolution the harmony between a man and a woman symbolizes a larger harmony within the society. In Godwin's novel, however, the harmony that exists between black and white individuals is not extended to racial groups. Racism still exists in her fictional Southern world, though it is relegated to the background: a woman in a supermarket says she pities the children that Leo and Camilla will have, the Klan still marches in Greensboro, Calvin's life is threatened and he heads north, and the prejudiced white father of a "D" student in Renee's class firebombs her house and kills her dog. And yet the reader is not left without hope. Stereotypical thinking exists in Gail Godwin's world but not between blacks and whites who know each other personally.

Neither Godwin nor Walker suggests that interracial friendships will eliminate prejudice between groups, nor do they subscribe to "the mystical belief that the category 'woman' is the most natural and basic of all human groupings and can therefore transcend race division," a phenomenon that Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis warn against in Common Differences. Although Godwin's portrait of the dynamics of interracial friendships is not as satisfyingly complex as Walker's, both writers suggest that if black and white women would only listen to each other's stories and find out about each other's lives, perhaps we would discover similarities that might allow us to better understand differences, as well as give us common goals. Both Gail Godwin and Alice Walker try to provide readers with such an experience through these novels. They make what we felt was strange about "the other" more familiar at the same time that they challenge our own sense of self. By imagining, as Audre Lorde calls for, some new "patterns for relating across our human differences as equals," Alice Walker and Gail Godwin enable us to see that unity need not depend on homogeneity nor difference mean separation or simplistic opposition.