[In the following excerpt, Dubey examines Eva's Man in light of the prescribed writing structures of the Black Aesthetics movement, arguing that Jones's focus on gender issues over racial inequality led to unfavorable reviews of the novel.]

Unlike Corregidora, Gayl Jones's Eva's Man (1976) cannot be even partially recovered into the Black Aesthetic critical mode. Each of the novel’s salient thematic and formal features, such as its treatment of castration and lesbianism, and its use of stereotypes, first-person narration, and black dialect, resists a Black Aesthetic reading. This defiance of the contemporary conditions of readability produces a visible sense of strain in the text. The most subversive moments of Eva's Man are shrouded in an incoherence that seriously jeopardizes the reader’s interpretive function, and prevents us from distilling any clear meaning from the text. It seems almost as if the novel must disclaim its right to meaning altogether if it cannot posit the clear, didactic meaning required by the Black Aesthetic. Eva's Man renders itself unreadable, as it were, in order both to escape the functional reading codes of the Black Aesthetic and to obscure its own refusal of these codes.

Predictably, then, the contemporary critical reception of Eva's Man was almost unanimously unfavorable.¹ The rare favorable review commended the novel precisely for its divergence from Black Aesthetic literature. For example, Richard Stookey of The Chicago Tribune Book Review found Eva's Man “refreshing” because unlike Stookey’s conception of the typical contemporary black novel, Eva's Man did not aim its anger and violence against racial oppression. Stookey went on to state that Eva's Man “goes about its business wholly without explicit reference to the dimension of racial oppression and in so doing elevates itself out of the supposed genre known as the ‘black novel’ and into the realm of universal art.” Stookey’s review dismisses racial oppression as a narrow, parochial concern, and explicitly states that the dynamics of sexual oppression constitute a literary theme of universal interest.² A reading such as Stookey’s lends credence to the black nationalist argument that black feminist literature was actively promoted by the white literary establishment primarily because it deflected attention away from white racism to black sexism.³ Loyle Hairston, a prominent Black Aesthetic critic, wrote that Eva's Man was accepted by white reviewers because of its critique of black men rather than of white society. While Hairston defended Corregidora because it was “far from being a feminist tract,” he castigated Eva's Man for being “a study in male hostility.”⁴ However, the contemporary critical furor over Eva's Man cannot be fully accounted for by the novel’s feminist focus and its emphasis on sexual rather than racial oppression. As we have already seen, Sula, too, was denounced by Black Aesthetic critics as a feminist novel that diverted attention away from white racism toward black sexism. But the Black Aestheticians’ disapproval of Eva's Man was pitched considerably higher than their critique of Sula. While Black Aesthetic critics debated the thematics and the sexual politics of Sula, Eva's Man seemed to represent such a powerful threat to black nationalist ideology that the very legitimacy of its publication was contested. Keith Mano, writing in Esquire, argued that Eva's Man lacks any artistic merit and if it had been written by a white or a black male novelist, “it would still be in manuscript.”⁵ Insinuating that Eva's Man was published only because Toni Morrison, as the editor at Random House, agreed to publish it, Mano deplored the fact that “more and more of late, publishing has become a transaction between women, for women.”⁶

Toni Morrison was fully cognizant of the ideological implications of her decision to publish Eva's Man. Morrison described the novel as a “considered editorial risk” because “someone might say, ‘Gee, all her [Jones's] novels are about women tearing up men.’”⁷ Morrison’s comment points to the one feature of Eva's Man that drew the most extreme negative reaction from contemporary critics—Eva's castration of Davis, which constitutes the climax of the novel. Unlike the other novels considered here, Eva's Man does not even attempt a resolution within the heterosexual parameters of Black Aesthetic ideology. The novel presents no black male character equivalent to Ajax in Sula, Mutt in Corregidora, Grange in The Third Life of Grange Copeland, or Truman in Meridian. While Mutt could be regarded as the liberator of a new black heterosexual femininity, the representation of black male characters in Eva's Man admits no possibility of a heterosexual compromise. Eva's castration of Davis and her consequent imprisonment appear to be the only logical conclusion to the novel, for each of Eva's heterosexual encounters results in violence and imprisonment. Eva's first heterosexual experience, with Freddy Smoot, initiates her into violence: after molesting her with a dirty popsicle stick (one of the many objects in the novel that stands in for the penis), Freddy presents Eva with a pocket knife. Eva threatens to use this pocket knife when Alfonso tries to molest her, and actually uses it when Moses Tripp takes her for a whore. Eva's stabbing of Moses Tripp leads to her first imprisonment in the novel, an imprisonment that is later replicated when her husband, James Hunn, keeps her locked in his home, and when Davis confines her to his apartment.

Eva's literal, physical imprisonment parallels her psychological imprisonment in the male-created stereotypes of black women as whores and bitches. These stereotypes serve the double function of constructing black women as a powerful, dangerous force, and of justifying the black masculine attempt to contain this force. The stereotype of the black woman as a whore, for example, invests black women with an excessive, disorderly sexual energy, which then becomes the object of masculine regulation. Similarly, the bitch stereotype endows the black woman with destructive power and strength; the subjugation of black women by black men is then rationalized as an attempt to curb this destructive power. However, stereotypes in the novel do not enact a simple exchange of power originating in the oppressor and directed at a helpless victim. Stereotypes are not merely imposed upon black women by black men; black women characters in the novel often appropriate the stereotype because it offers them their only means of exercising power. For example, when Eva occupies the position of greatest power over Davis, as she kills and castrates him, she is actually submitting to the images through which Davis has perceived her. Soon after they meet, Davis misnames Eva Medina as Eve and Medusa, thus remaking her in the traditional conception of women as evil corrupters and destroyers of men. Eva seems to acquiesce to Davis’s naming of her even at her moment of greatest resistance. Biting Davis’s penis, she casts herself in the role that Davis assigned her, of Eve biting the apple: “I bit down hard. My teeth in an apple.”⁸ Immediately after the castration, Eva assumes Davis’s second image of her: “I'm Medusa, I was thinking. Men look at me and get hard-ons. I turn their dicks to stone. I laughed” (p. 130). Eva's laugh is only one of the many details that complicate the novel’s treatment of stereotypes: Eva is both laughing the powerful laugh of the Medusa and laughing at Davis’s conception of her as Medusa.

The novel’s presentation of the stereotype as the site of ambivalent exchanges of power is most clearly apparent in its treatment of the Queen Bee, the community’s name for a woman who takes on a series of lovers, each of whom dies soon after his encounter with her. The image of the Queen Bee, created by the black women of the community, reveals these women's internalization of the conception of black women as whores and bitches. However, this image does not merely reflect the women's passive acceptance of masculine stereotypes; the Queen Bee stereotype is manipulated by the novel’s black female characters to serve a number of different uses. Miss Billie and Eva's mother turn the type into a subject, humanize the Queen Bee by looking at her from the inside rather than the outside. Eva's mother feels that “she would be more scared to be the Queen Bee than to be any of the men” (p. 41) because the Queen Bee cannot love whom she wants. Miss Billie, receptive to this entirely new perception of the Queen Bee, admits that “she hadn't never looked at it that way, but it must be hard on the Queen Bee too” (p. 41). Eva's appropriation of the Queen Bee stereotype plays yet another variation on it. While the original Queen Bee commits suicide, helplessly accepting the guilt for her involuntary destructive power over men, Eva actively exercises this power when she murders Davis. Eva's assumption of the Queen Bee stereotype transforms it into a symbol of vengeance, but even this articulation does not finally fix the type’s potential meaning. The Queen Bee type continues to transform itself, accruing new and even contradictory layers of meaning with each configuration. Toward the end of the novel, Eva's madness mobilizes the stereotype beyond recognition, as Eva becomes both the Queen Bee and the victim of the bee’s sting (p. 151). Eva's insane play with the stereotype finally divests it even of the gender specificity that originally motivated the type; Eva imagines herself as a feminine flower stung by a masculine Queen Bee: “He stings me between my breasts, the bud between my legs. My flower” (p. 151).

The novel’s treatment of the Queen Bee and of other sexual stereotypes is markedly at odds with the theorization of the stereotype in Black Aesthetic and early black feminist criticism, both of which construed the stereotype as a false image imposed on the oppressed by the oppressor, and enjoined black writers to counter the stereotype with the authentic, actual experience of black men and women. The black writer should thus invoke the authority of realism to challenge and correct the falsity of the stereotype. In his diatribe against Sula, Corregidora, and Eva's Man, Addison Gayle urges readers to censure these novels’ distorted, stereotypical presentation of blacks and to demand, instead, more “realistic paradigms” of black experience.⁹ In a black feminist reading that only superficially differs from Gayle’s, Gloria Wade-Gayles justifies Eva's Man on the grounds of its realism: “Jones's fictive world mirrors the real world Ladner and other sociologists have studied.”¹⁰ In their common appeal to realism, both Addison Gayle and Gloria Wade-Gayles overlook the complex status of “reality” in Eva's Man. The novel not only eschews the authority of narrative realism; it also thematically poses the question of the “real” in terms entirely incommensurate with Gayle’s and Wade-Gayles’s opposition of stereotype and reality.

Eva's Man provides no authentic black femininity against which we might measure the truth or falsity of a particular stereotype. Characters in the novel are entirely constructed by the distorted perceptions of others; the novel presents no original, essential selfhood that escapes this stereotypical structuring. Eva's character, for example, is first introduced to us through the words and images of others: the newspaper portrays Eva as a “wild woman” (p. 3), and the general public perceives her as a whore (p. 4). Nowhere in the novel are these images revised or superseded, as Eva never articulates her sense of difference from these stereotypical constructions. We are given no reason to believe that she possesses a hidden, integral self that resists or precedes the stereotype; on the contrary, Eva consistently validates the stereotypical expectations of male characters in the novel. To give one example, Moses Tripp tells Eva, “One of these days you going to meet a man, and go somewhere and sleep with him. I know a woman like you” (p. 166). Eva's encounter with Davis, to all appearances, confirms Tripp’s perception of her as a whore. Even while the novel militates against the stereotypical perception of black women as whores and bitches, it does not offer any alternative, authentic definition of black femininity that exceeds these stereotypes.

The novel’s exclusive reliance on stereotypical characterization refuses the realist model of character as the reflection of a knowable real subject. Not only the characters in the novel, but the novel itself relentlessly constructs identity in stereotypical terms.¹¹ Characterization in Eva's Man is a random yoking of names and attributes. Especially in the second half of the novel, traits are so arbitrarily shuffled from one name to another that the difference between names ceases to signify, and the realist notion of character—as a distinctive collection of physical and psychological traits—loses all functional value. The displacement of character traits along a chain of different names is so pervasive that it is difficult to isolate particular examples; character fragments double and triple each other in a hollow mirroring that complicates any conception of the subject as a coherent, unified entity. Eva and Elvira, Charlotte and Joanne double each other. In an imagined scene with Mr. Logan, Eva substitutes herself for Miss Billie, James Hunn substitutes for Freddy Smoot, for Eva's father, and for Davis. The prison psychiatrist (who shares Freddy Smoot’s last name and reminds Eva of Tyrone) tries to fix the process of character substitution around the name of Davis, suggesting that he represents all the men who had ever abused Eva. Eva's response to the psychiatrist’s suggestion—“Who?” (p. 81)—indicates that the chain of substitutions lacks any end or origin; characters ceaselessly displace and replace each other in a process of empty reflection that denies any access to the real nature of identity. Far from the authentic, self-present subject of black nationalist discourse, the novel’s use of stereotypes figures the black subject as fragmented, absent,¹² and lacking any ground in reality.

The novel’s failure to posit an authentic black subject is not, however, its most serious point of difference from contemporary black articulations of the stereotype. While Black Aesthetic and feminist critics invoked the authority of realism, their equally strong emphasis on positive images exposed the limits of this realism. According to these theorists, the black writer must not only contest stereotypes with the truth; more importantly, the black writer must replace negative stereotypes with positive images.¹³ The contradiction between realism and positive images apparently went unnoticed; in the same essay, Addison Gayle advised black writers to present “realistic paradigms” and to “create images, symbols and metaphors of positive import from the black experience.”¹⁴ Some of the most critical contemporary reviews of Eva's Man focused on the novel’s failure to present positive, politically functional images of blacks. June Jordan, for example, begins her review of the novel with the familiar opposition of stereotype and reality, describing Eva's Man as a book of “sinister misinformation” that fails to revise the existing stereotypes of black women.¹⁵ Further in Jordan’s review, however, it becomes clear that the real problem with Eva's Man is not that it perpetuates stereotypes, but that these stereotypes are negative and do not serve a clear moral or political function:

I fear for the meaning of this novel. What does it mean when a young Black woman sits down to compose a universe of Black people limited to animal dynamics? And what will such testimony, such perverse ambivalence contribute to the understanding of young girls in need of rescue and protection?¹⁶

Jordan’s comments identify the two features of the novel’s use of negative stereotypes that cannot be reconciled with Black Aesthetic or early black feminist theory: the novel’s presentation of blacks through time-worn sexual stereotypes (“people limited to animal dynamics”), and its refusal to offer a clear, didactic judgment of these stereotypes (“perverse ambivalence”).

Eva's Man provides more than enough support for the first of Jordan’s objections, in its narrow presentation of blacks as entirely sexual creatures. All of the novel’s characters are driven by a sexual appetite that seems absolutely beyond the control of reason. Eva learns to view herself and other blacks as sexual animals through the education she receives from Miss Billie and her mother. Miss Billie repeatedly uses animal imagery to describe black males: Freddy Smoot is a “banny rooster” (p. 14) and the other black boys in the neighborhood are “a bunch of wild horses” (p. 20). Miss Billie’s repetition of the words, “Once you open your legs, … it seem like you caint close them” (p. 15), impresses upon Eva her society’s perception of black feminine sexuality as an uncontrollable natural urge. The rest of the novel sustains this association of sexual, natural, and animal by means of frequent metaphorical overlaps between food, sex, and defecation. When Eva rejects Elvira’s sexual propositioning, Elvira describes Eva as “sitting right on a pot, but afraid to shit” (p. 40). Mustard reminds Davis of “baby’s turd” (p. 8) and vinegar and egg of feminine sexuality. As the man with no thumb refers to Eva as “sweetmeat” (p. 68), Eva's gaze persistently returns to the plate of pigfeet in front of him. Alfonso mocks Eva's virginity, repeating, “Most girls your age had the meat and the gravy” (p. 57). After sex with Davis, Eva feels “like an egg sucked hollow and then filled with raw oysters” (p. 66). The metaphorical identification of food and sex culminates in Eva's castration of Davis: “I raised blood, slime from cabbage, blood sausage” (p. 128).

Confining its characters to this restricted orbit of food, sex, and defecation, Eva's Man seems to support the age-old racist stereotype of blacks as primitive and animalistic. The novel’s apparent adherence to this stereotype drew the most extreme negative reactions from Black Aesthetic critics. In his caustic review of Eva's Man, Addison Gayle wrote that the novel remains trapped in negative myths “borrowed from a racist society.” According to Gayle, Eva's Man envisions blacks as “a primitive people defined totally in terms of our sexuality; … ours is the world of instinctual gratification—where sex, not power, not humanity, reigns supreme.”¹⁷ Gayle’s comment is accurate in the sense that Eva's Man does not overtly or thematically reject the primitive black stereotype.¹⁸ On a formal level, however, the novel’s tight enclosure of the reader as well as the characters within the sexual stereotype implicitly conveys the limitations of this stereotype. The novel’s obsessive emphasis on the natural, instinctual functions paradoxically achieves the effect of denaturalizing these functions. Eva's Man repeats and recycles a limited number of sexual stereotypes in a stylized manner that forces us to regard black sexuality as a textual fabrication rather than a natural essence. The problem with Eva's Man, then, is not that it fails to critique the stereotype of the primitive black, but that this critique is not explicit enough to meet the Black Aesthetic demand for a clear, didactic literature. Gayl Jones herself was aware that her ambivalent use of stereotypes could not be reconciled with the contemporary concern with “positive race images.”¹⁹ The “perverse ambivalence” of Eva's Man derives from its reluctance to pass unequivocal thematic judgments on the racist and sexist stereotypes of the past, and its failure to offer a new set of positive and politically useful images of blacks.

The question of negative stereotypes versus positive images of blacks intersects with another important area of Black Aesthetic theory: its opposition of the oppressive past and the free future. Black Aestheticians optimistically relegated negative stereotypes of blacks to the historical past; Larry Neal, for example, declared that “there are no stereotypes any more. History has killed Uncle Tom.”²⁰ Only through a repression of the oppressive historical past could Black Aesthetic writers liberate a new, revolutionary consciousness. The temporal vision of Eva's Man fails to respect this dichotomy between old and new, past and present. Toward the beginning of the novel, Eva states that “the past is still as hard on me as the present” (p. 5). The novel’s structure insistently enacts the repetition of the past in the present. The entire narrative is a desperate act of memory: Eva obsessively remembers her past in an unsuccessful attempt to order and transcend it. Eva's conception of time as a repetitive sameness erases any difference between the past, present, and future. This sameness, however, does not constitute a vision of temporal continuity. The fragmented structure of the novel presents time as a series of shattered moments linked to each other by sheer, random repetition.

Of all the novels considered here, Eva's Man most radically disrupts the bildungsroman structuring of time as a medium of change, progress, and development. It is possible to detect a submerged linear strand in the first part of the novel, which presents Eva's life in a roughly chronological fashion. In chapter 1, the eight-year-old Eva has her first sexual encounter with Freddy Smoot. Chapter 2, the only chapter in the novel that preserves a clear linear focus, deals with the twelve-year-old Eva's perception of her mother, father, and Tyrone. Subsequent chapters present the key incidents in Eva's life, from her stabbing of Moses Tripp to her marriage with James Hunn. Part 1 ends with Eva's desertion of James Hunn and her decision to work at P. Lorillard Tobacco Company. The next three sections of the novel abandon linear chronology altogether; Eva's earliest memories of Freddy Smoot and her encounters with Elvira and the psychiatrist in the narrative present merge into the same meaningless cycle.

The cyclic structure of Eva's Man offers no possibility of redemption, unlike the spiral structure of Sula or the blues form of Corregidora. The structure of Eva's Man is more akin to the tightly closed circles that structure The Bluest Eye. In both novels, circular repetition creates a sense of suffocation for the reader; the thematic entrapment of the protagonists of the two novels is replicated by the reader’s imprisonment in the novels’ repetitive structures.²¹ The circular repetition of both novels installs a deterministic vision of time and history that allows no possibility of change or transformation.²²Eva's Man, even more so than The Bluest Eye, bears out Roger Rosenblatt’s thesis that circular form in black American fiction frequently figures history as an overdetermined, inescapable destiny.²³ This despairing vision of history is, of course, exactly opposed to the black nationalist belief in new beginnings, in a revolutionary future that can obliterate the oppressive past.

Eva does seek an escape from her own oppressive past, but her search for temporal redemption does not direct her toward the future-oriented goal of black nationalist discourse. Eva's attempt to counter her sense of the fragmentation of time involves a recursion into her ancestral past. Contrary to the nationalist affirmation of temporal discontinuity, Eva's Man implies that only a recovery of ancestral continuity can redeem the senseless temporal cycle that imprisons Eva. Early in the novel, Miss Billie gives Eva one of her “ancestors bracelets,” and impresses upon Eva the importance of being “true to one's ancestors. She said there were two people you had to be true to—those people who came before you and those people who came after you” (p. 22). Eva's alienation from the ancestral cycle is signaled by her loss of Miss Billie’s bracelet when she is eight years old. The bracelet seems to symbolize a temporal continuity dependent upon reproduction: Miss Billie with-holds the bracelet from her daughter, Charlotte, until she decides to get married and have children. Charlotte and Eva—like Joanne Riley, who doubles Charlotte and Eva in several ways—refuse to have any children; this refusal does not seem to be liberating, as it is for Sula or Ursa. For Eva, at least, a liberation from the temporal cycle seems possible only through a recovery of generational continuity.

The redemptive possibilities of Eva's lost ancestral past are embodied in the gypsy Medina, after whom Eva and her great-grandmother are named. Medina’s character is rich with inchoate possibilities that Eva (or the novel) fails to realize. Medina intersects only obliquely with Eva's ancestral past: she is a white gypsy whose incoherent promise is filtered to Eva though the memories of her great-grandmother. Medina’s race is crucial to her function in the novel; as a white woman, she cannot represent a pure racial or ancestral origin for Eva. Moreover, Medina speaks deprecatingly of peckerwoods, seemingly unaware that she herself falls into this stereotypical category. When Eva's great-grandfather tries to reduce Medina to the stereotype, Eva's great-grandmother points out that Medina is not a peckerwood simply because she does not see herself as one. Medina’s perception of herself provides Eva's sole glimpse of a psychological freedom that escapes the constriction of racial stereotyping.

Medina offers a possible release not only from Eva's imprisonment in stereotypes, but also from her imprisonment in time and in hetero-sexuality:

The gypsy Medina, Great-Grandmama said, had time in the palm of her hand. She told Great-Grandfather, “She told me to look in the palm of her hand and she had time in it.”

Great-Grandfather said, “What did she want you to do, put a little piece of silver over top of the time.”

Great-Grandmother said, “No.” Then she looked embarrassed. Then she said, “She wanted me to kiss her inside her hand.”

Great-Grandfather started laughing.

(p. 48)

The image of Medina holding time in the palm of her hand exemplifies her control over time, as opposed to Eva's helpless entrapment in it. Meditating on her own sense of time as an inevitable, uncontrollable force that denies human choice, Eva repeatedly recalls Medina, and asks, “Do you think there are some things we can't help from letting happen?” (p. 49). Eva tries to recover Medina’s secret power over time by kissing the palm of Davis’s hand, but Eva's heterosexual variation on Medina’s latently lesbian gesture robs it of all meaning. In the passage quoted above, Eva's great-grandmother’s embarrassment at mentioning the kiss to her husband suggests its unspoken erotic implications. Eva's great-grandFather's laughter and his cynical interpretation of Medina as a typical gypsy who wants nothing but money, imply that Medina’s mysterious promise is not accessible to men. That Medina represents a distinctly feminine possibility is confirmed in the scene when Eva tells Davis about Medina, and he, like Eva's great-grandfather, “laughed hard” and “said he didn't know what I meant” (p. 49).

Throughout the novel, Eva tries to affirm her continuity with her namesake. When Davis misnames her Medusa, Eva fiercely defends her ancestral name. Wandering from town to town, Eva attempts to recover the mobility of the gypsy, and repeatedly draws attention to her own wild hair, reminiscent of the thick hair of Medina. However, Eva's continuity with Medina does not go beyond the external details of name, appearance, and physical mobility. Eva holds only sweat in the palms of her hands, failing to recapture Medina’s grasp of time. The redemptive possibility suggested by Medina becomes increasingly obscure and in-accessible as the novel progresses: “I licked the palms of my hands. I bit shadows” (p. 157). Soon after Eva kills and castrates Davis, she imagines Medina telling her to “toss his blood into the wind and it will dry” (p. 138). Medina’s advice does not help to absolve Eva's sense of guilt, as is clear from the blood imagery that pervades the last two sections of the novel.

The very end of the novel, however, seems to suggest that Eva has succeeded in realizing some of the possibilities figured by Medina: Eva's acceptance of Elvira as a lover implies that Eva has escaped the heterosexual pattern of violence and imprisonment. The novel’s conclusion also suggests that with Elvira, Eva has finally liberated herself from the past, as this is the only time in the novel that Eva is able to live in and affirm the present moment:

“Tell me when it feels sweet, Eva. Tell me when it feels sweet, honey.”

I leaned back, squeezing her face between my legs, and told her, “Now.”

(p. 177, emphasis mine)

It is questionable, however, whether Elvira actually represents a viable alternative to Eva's earlier imprisonment in heterosexual relationships. For one thing, the very physical setting of their relationship, a prison cell, detracts from its liberatory possibilities. Darryl Pinckney argues that the lesbian encounter of Eva and Elvira is “not prison rape, the articulation of power. It is an indication of emotional requirements still unsatisfied.”²⁴ Eva's acceptance of Elvira, however, seems to be motivated not by emotional but by purely sexual requirements. An earlier conversation between the two women, in which Elvira complains that female prisoners are not allowed male “sex visits” (p. 149), suggests that Eva and Elvira come together only because heterosexual relationships are not permitted in prison.

Further, Elvira pursues Eva as aggressively as do the men in the novel, and her propositioning of Eva is couched in the language of heterosexual seduction. Frequently, it is impossible to distinguish between Elvira’s words and the words of Eva's male lovers. For example, Elvira’s “You hard, why you have to be so hard?” (p. 158) recalls Davis’s “You a hard woman, too, ain’t you?” (p. 8). In some passages in the novel, Elvira’s words exactly echo the words of male characters who probe or violate the privacy of women:

“How did it feel?” Elvira asked.

“How did you feel?” the psychiatrist asked.

“How did it feel?” Elvira asked.

“How do it feel, Mizz Canada?” the man asked my mama.

(p. 77)

This passage, along with many others, reduces Elvira’s lesbian difference to the repetitive sameness of all the heterosexual encounters in the novel. It is not the radical difference of lesbianism from heterosexuality, but a mere fact of circumstance (the unavailability of men in prison) that leads Eva to Elvira.

However, if the lesbian encounter of Eva and Elvira is no different from Eva's heterosexual encounters, why is it made to carry the burden of resolving the novel’s heterosexual conflicts? The very placing of the Eva-Elvira scene, at the end of the novel, invites us to read it with the special emphasis that fictional conclusions conventionally require. Simply through its placing at the end of the plot, lesbianism is invested with a significance that the novel otherwise refuses to develop. This ambivalent treatment of lesbianism is also evident in other details, such as the brevity of the scene, as well as its absolute lack of preparation. Immediately before Eva succumbs to Elvira, the narrative directly addresses Davis: “Last night she got in the bed with me, Davis. I knocked her out, but I don't know how long I'm going to keep knocking her out” (p. 176). This is, significantly, the only instance in the novel where Eva's narrative directly addresses another character; this address achieves the effect of reasserting Eva's heterosexual desire for Davis and diminishing the value of her lesbian encounter with Elvira. Eva's address to Davis further strips the lesbian scene of all significance by suggesting that Eva is motivated by the sheer tedium of resisting Elvira’s persistent advances.

The novel’s incoherent treatment of lesbianism is not surprising, given the contemporary hostility to positive portrayals of lesbian characters in black fiction.²⁵ As we have already seen in the chapters on Sula and Corregidora, the ambivalent presentation of lesbianism in black women's fiction of the 1970s marks these novels’ adjustment to the heterosexual emphasis of black nationalist discourse. Eva's Man goes further than Sula or Corregidora in pushing the resolution of its protagonist’s plot outside a heterosexual frame. This uncompromising refusal of heterosexuality logically leads to a consideration of lesbianism as a probable point of resolution. Eva's Man does admit the full implications of its critique of heterosexuality, presenting lesbianism as the only remaining plot choice for its protagonist. Having gone so far, however, the novel withdraws meaning from its own conclusion, as if in a belated effort to appease its contemporary reading public. The necessity of this self-protective gesture becomes evident through even a superficial glance at contemporary reviews of Eva's Man; the judgment expressed in Publishers Weekly, that Eva “descends into the ultimate corruption in prison,”²⁶ is typical of the contemporary response to the novel’s lesbian conclusion.

The novel’s treatment of castration is even more fraught with ambivalence than its treatment of lesbianism. Lesbianism and castration are the two thematic elements of Eva's Man that pose the most serious threat to the heterosexual assumptions of Black Aesthetic ideology; hence, the severely strained treatment of these two elements. Like lesbianism, castration occupies a highly privileged place in the novel’s plot: as the climax, the castration inevitably bears a heavy interpretive weight. The castration scene is marked by the sudden appearance of italics and by a symbolic and metaphorical overload that further encourages the reader to attach extra emphasis to the scene. The very language of the narration thickens as Eva remembers her castration of Davis. Almost as if to compensate for the castration, Eva offers a series of metaphorical substitutes for the penis, such as sausage, apple, plum, and milkweed. In later chapters, this metaphorical substitution extends to include owl, eel, cock, and lemon. The strain in the novel’s presentation of the castration is apparent in that the scene seems unable to bear the burden of meaning that it is made to carry. For example, Eva's comparison of the castration to Eve’s biting the apple opens up a possibly rich symbolic field. However, the immediately following comparison of the penis to another fruit, the plum, denies the symbolic potential of the apple by returning us to a literal level of meaning, where the apple is merely a fruit.

This simultaneous arousal and withdrawal of meaning exemplifies the difficult interpretive access that the castration scene provides the reader. In this scene, Eva directly addresses the reader for the first and only time in the novel: “What would you do if you bit down and your teeth raised blood from an apple? Flesh from an apple? What would you do? Flesh and blood from an apple? What would you do with the apple? How would you feel?” (p. 128). While this direct address appears to solicit the reader’s active participation in the scene, Eva's questions actually deflect the reader’s interpretive activity. Instead of answering the reader’s question, “How did it feel?”—a question obsessively posed to Eva by the other characters in the novel—Eva simply throws this question back at the reader. She further complicates the reader’s function in this scene by suggesting that she killed and castrated Davis because he did not tell her about his wife (p. 129). The reader cannot, however, accept the explanation Eva offers here, for we have been told earlier that “there were also people saying I did it because I found out about his wife. That's what they tried to say at the trial because that was the easiest answer they could get” (p. 4). Pushing us toward an interpretation that has been discredited earlier, the novel makes it impossible for us to answer the question, “How did it feel?”—the question that, in a sense, motivates the entire narrative. Michael Cooke has described Eva's Man as “a curt, elided whydunit.”²⁷ The novel offers several possible reasons for Eva's castration of Davis: his silence about his wife, his physical imprisonment of Eva, his refusal to commit himself to her, his stereotypical perception of her as a whore. All these answers are true to a certain extent, but they do not seem to answer adequately the question of Eva's motivation. The novel anticipates all the explanations the reader is likely to entertain and robs them of validity by showing that they were imposed upon Eva at the trial, by the psychiatrist and by a curious, sensation-seeking press and public. Eva herself remains conspicuously silent about her motive, refusing to provide an authoritative interpretation of the castration.

The castration, then, seems to mean everything and nothing; the novel surrounds its climactic incident with an obscurity and density that discourage the reader from extracting any clear meanings or ideological messages from the incident. This incoherence, like the incoherent treatment of lesbianism, partially obscures the novel’s uncompromising refusal to cater to the heterosexual expectations of its contemporary reading public. Again, a mere glance at the contemporary critical response to Eva's Man allows us to understand the novel’s contradictory treatment of the castration as a necessary defensive gesture. Black Aesthetic criticism of Eva's Man rises to a shrill and almost paranoid pitch when it confronts the novel’s presentation of castration. In Addison Gayle’s review of the novel, for example, literary and even political judgments give way to sheer personal vilification of the author. According to Gayle, it is Jones and not Eva who seeks “a personal release from pain, a private catharsis, which could be achieved only when the Black man had been rendered impotent.”²⁸ In a discussion with Roseann Bell, Gayle goes even further: “If Gayl Jones believes that Black men are what she says they are, she ought to get a white man.”²⁹

Perhaps it was precisely in order to protect herself from such criticism that Gayl Jones repeatedly tried to curtail the scope of the novel’s meaning. Jones said, in an interview: “I'm sure people will ask me if That's the way I see the essential relationship between men and women. But that man and woman don't stand for men and women—they stand for themselves, really.”³⁰ Jones partly succeeded in her attempt to restrict the meaning of Eva's Man to a particular story of a particular man and woman. Several critics, such as Margo Jefferson and Larry McMurtry, have read the novel as a narrow, concentrated exploration of a single life that is not representative of the lives of black men and women in general.³¹ Jones also tried to delimit the political significance of Eva's Man by emphasizing the difference between the author and the narrator, and directly linking this difference to the absence of political messages in her work:

There are moments in my literature, as in any literature, that have aesthetic, social, and political implications but I don't think that I can be a “responsible” writer in the sense that those things are meant because I'm too interested in contradictory character and ambivalent character and I like to explore them without judgements entering the work—without a point of view entering.³²

The use of first-person narration in Eva's Man works to distance the author from the risky ideological implications of the novel. The complete absence of authorial intervention closes us within Eva's mind, and compels us to read the novel as an effect of a particular character’s restricted vision.³³ The first-person narration of Eva's Man thus helps to contain the novel’s controversial thematic material.

This containment is facilitated by the unreliability of the novel’s first-person narrator. It is impossible to assign any truth value to Eva's narration because, as the psychiatrist tells her at the beginning of the novel, she does not know how “to separate the imagined memories from the real ones” (p. 10). Eva insistently tries to convince us of the truth of her narrative at precisely those moments when the reader most seriously doubts her: “Naw, I'm not lying. He [James] said, ‘Act like a whore, I'll fuck you like a whore.’ Naw, I'm not lying” (p. 163). We know, however, that Eva is lying, for she attributes to James the exact words that her father spoke to her mother. The very exactness of the repetition here and elsewhere, robs Eva's narrative of the authority of realism.³⁴ Eva's unreliability permeates every detail of the novel, including her castration of Davis. The police report and the prison psychiatrist inform Eva that she did not bite off Davis’s penis, as she believes; the very truth of the novel’s central incident is thus thrown into doubt.

The unreliability of Eva's narration is, of course, a result of her madness. Eva's madness functions as a kind of safety valve, allowing readers to dismiss the more uncomfortable moments of the novel as the distorted fabrications of an insane mind. The use of a mad narrator serves to distance not only the reader, but also the author, from the ideological implications of the work. Keith Byerman, in fact, discounts a reading of Eva's Man as a feminist novel precisely on the grounds of Eva's madness, emphasizing that “the ideology, the madness are Eva's, not Gayl Jones’.”³⁵ The peculiar ideological function performed by madness in Eva's Man may be better appreciated by means of a comparison with The Bluest Eye. Pecola’s madness serves as an instrument of social satire, strengthening the novel’s powerful critique of the violence, racism, and sexism of American society. The novel’s relentless tracing of the causality of Pecola’s madness gives this madness a social dimension, and constructs Pecola as a helpless victim of her society. That Pecola’s madness is narrated by Claudia and the omniscient narrator allows the reader to place her madness in some kind of relation to a sane, “real” world. Eva's Man provides the reader no directions, no clues to a correct reading of Eva's madness. The novel’s kaleidoscopic jumbling of time (itself an effect of Eva's madness) makes it impossible to establish a causality, an origin for Eva's madness. We have no means of judging whether the repetition of events in Eva's life caused her insanity or whether Eva's insanity is the source of the repetition of events in her narrative. All we have is Eva's madness, unmediated by a sane narrator; we are given no relatively real fictional world that might help us place Eva's madness in perspective. This unmooring of Eva's madness from any “real” narrative context greatly complicates the reader’s interpretive function. We cannot identify with Eva, or take away any clear meaning from her madness. Eva's madness contributes, as it were, to the impression of self-containment conveyed by Eva's Man. Eva's unfiltered, insane, first-person narration serves to lock meaning inside the text, and to diminish the text’s power to illuminate the reader’s world.

Our sense of the self-containment of the text is intensified by the narrator's vehement denial of the very acts of reading and interpretation. The novel presents a supposedly qualified reader of Eva's madness in the prison psychiatrist, who anticipates most of the reader’s possible explanations for Eva's madness. At the end, Eva effectively stalls the psychiatrist’s and the reader’s interpretive activity: “don't explain me. don't you explain me. don't you explain me” (p. 173). It is difficult to disregard Eva's plea, considering that all the reader surrogates in the novel (the lawyers, the police, the journalists, and the general public) assault Eva's integrity with their sexist, stereotypical readings. Eva tells the psychiatrist, “don't look at me. don't make people look at me” (p. 168). Throughout the novel, Eva is defined by male characters looking at her and interpreting her. In her attempt to explain to the prison psychiatrist why she killed Davis, Eva keeps repeating, “The way he was looking at me …, the way he was looking at me. … Every man could look at me the way he was looking. They all would” (p. 171). The acts of looking and interpretation are invariably acts of masculine power in Eva's Man; the novel offers no possibility of a looking, a reading that can respect the integrity of the feminine object. Any kind of interpretation appears to be a violation of the text’s privacy. Eva's Man preserves its own integrity by refusing the reader’s function, and constituting itself as an unreadable, inviolable text.

The opaque surface of Eva's Man works as a kind of protective device, and achieves a formal containment of the novel’s subversive treatment of contemporary ideological material. This use of first-person narration also challenges the formal requirements of Black Aesthetic ideology, although the first-person voice in itself is not inimical to the collective, oral emphasis of the Black Aesthetic. As Charles Rowell points out, “the first person as a narrative device is … a preferred form in the oral tradition.” Gayl Jones agrees that the “subjective testimony” of first-person oral storytelling establishes a continuity between the speaker and the listener.³⁶ In Eva's Man, however, the first-person mode serves the exactly opposite function of sealing off the narrator from the reader. Eva announces, “I didn't want to tell my story” (p. 77); her resistance to the act of narration, her view of interpretation as violation, and her distrust of her audience,³⁷ controvert the Black Aesthetic celebration of the oral artist’s untroubled relation to the community. As Jones herself pointed out, Eva's Man poses “a kind of challenge to the listener.”³⁸ While the novel employs the first-person mode privileged in the oral tradition, its use of this mode achieves an effect of self-enclosure that denies the collective emphasis of Black Aesthetic ideology.

A similar contradiction characterizes the novel’s presentation of black speech, another formal feature valorized in Black Aesthetic theory. Eva's Man seems in accord with the Black Aesthetic in its exclusive reliance on black speech (or dialect) as the medium of narration. Unlike The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Corregidora, Eva's Man does not use standard English to mediate the dialect spoken by its characters. In an influential essay on the development of black dialect as a literary language, John Wideman writes that in most black fiction, dialect is contained within the linguistic hierarchy implied by a standard English narrative frame. According to Wideman, Jones's novels mark a significant development in the use of black dialect, for they provide

no privileged position from which to view [the] fictional world, no terms into which it asks to be translated. … A Black Woman's voice creates the only valid terms … ; the authority of her language is not subordinated to other codes; the frame has disappeared.³⁹

It is true that the dialect in Eva's Man, used without a legitimizing frame, constitutes a literary language in its own right. But it is not so easy to agree with Wideman's assertion that the novel grants full authority to the black Woman's voice, for Eva does not fully possess or exercise control over the language she uses. If anything, she seems imprisoned in the dialect, which, as it is presented in the novel, is emphatically not a black Woman's language. Melvin Dixon argues that Eva is unable to achieve salvation because she is alienated from the regenerative possibilities of the black speech community.⁴⁰ In Eva's Man, however, the dialect is not invested with any regenerative possibilities for black women.⁴¹ Throughout the novel, black dialect constructs black women as obscene sexual objects, as whores and bitches. In this dialect, with its profusion of derogatory terms for black women, black men possess the sole right to name women. Eva's rare attempt to usurp this masculine prerogative is promptly corrected by Tyrone: “don't you call me evil, you little evil devil bitch” (p. 35). For the most part, Eva helplessly reproduces the dialect that she recognizes is not her own language: “I didn't give a shit what his name was, I was thinking in the kind of language Alfonso would use” (p. 97). Eva's entrapment in the dialect is accentuated by the novel’s repetitive play with the dialect. Gayl Jones has drawn attention to her use of ritualized as opposed to naturalistic dialogue.⁴² In Eva's Man, stylized repetition of dialogue fragments creates a ritual effect that denaturalizes black dialect, and forces a recognition of its non-dialogic construction of black women. The very fact that, so often in Eva's Man, dialogues are not even attributed to particular characters emphasizes the sameness of these dialogues. One dialogue after another defines and traps Eva in the same narrow terminology of bitch and whore.

On the level of narrative voice, then, Eva's Man upsets all the formal priorities of Black Aesthetic theory—the authority of realism, the immediate relationship between narrator and audience, and the use of black dialect to free a unique literary voice. Eva's first-person narration partly succeeds in containing the novel’s treatment of lesbianism and castration, the two thematic elements that absolutely negate the heterosexual emphasis of black nationalist ideology. However, if the first-person narrator works as a device of thematic containment, it produces fresh contradictions at a formal level. The self-enclosure of the novel’s first-person voice, and its resistance to interpretation, controvert both the collective and the didactic bent of Black Aesthetic discourse. Moreover, while using the dialect that would ostensibly liberate a new, distinctly black voice, Eva's Man filters the dialect through a feminine narrator (or, more accurately, filters a feminine narrator through the dialect), thus exposing the restricted liberatory possibilities of this language. Unlike Corregidora’s use of the blues, Eva's Man does not explore any alternative means of representing the black feminine difference from the Black Aesthetic. The novel does, however, graphically display the difficulty of reading or writing black femininity according to the codes of Black Aesthetic ideology.

Notes

1. Clarence Major was one of the very few contemporary black critics to give Eva's Man a favorable review. Major’s review stands virtually alone in its consideration of the novel’s formal features rather than its ideology. See Major, Review of Eva's Man, Library Journal (March 15, 1976): 834–35.

2. Richard Stookey, Review of Eva's Man, Chicago Tribune Book Review (March 28, 1976): 3. The novel’s exclusive emphasis on the sexual victimization of black women by black men was the feature most emphasized by contemporary reviewers. Like Stookey, Charles Larson praised Eva's Man for its exploration of sexual conflict, which, according to Larson, “is not exactly a Black issue.” See Larson, Review of Eva's Man, National Observer (April 17, 1976): section 5, p. 27. Also see Jessica Harris, Review of Eva's Man, Essence 7 (1976): 87; and two unsigned reviews of Eva's Man in Kirkus Reviews 44 (1976): 90, and Booklist 72 (1976): 1164.

3. This argument is offered by Askia Toure, “Black Male/Female Relations: A Political Overview of the 1970s,” The Black Scholar 10, nos. 8–9 (1979): 46; and Ron Karenga, “On Wallace’s Myths: Wading through Troubled Waters,” The Black Scholar 10, nos. 8–9 (1979): 36.

4. Loyle Hairston, “No Feminist Tract,” Freedomways 15 (1975): 291; Hairston, “The Repelling World of Sex and Violence,” Freedomways 16 (1976); 133.

5. Keith Mano, “How to Write Two First Novels with Your Knuckles,” Esquire (December 1976): 66.

6. Ibid., p. 62.

7. Ibid.

8. Gayl Jones, Eva's Man (Boston: Beacon, 1976), p. 128. All further references to this work are included in the text.

9. Addison Gayle, Jr., “Blueprint for Black Criticism,” Black World 1, no. 1 (1977): 44.

10. Gloria Wade-Gayles, No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black women's Fiction (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984), p. 178.

11. The novel’s reliance on stereotypical characterization provoked John Updike’s comment that “the characters are dehumanized as much by [Jones's] artistic vision as by their circumstances.” See Updike, Review of Eva's Man, The New Yorker (August 9, 1976): 75.

12. In its figuration of the black feminine subject as an absence, Eva's Man resembles The Bluest Eye (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). Like Pecola, Eva tries to understand black feminine sexuality by observing her mother’s sexual relationship with her father. Like Pecola, who cannot imagine the black woman as the subject of desire because of the “no noise at all from her mother” (p. 49), Eva perceives black feminine sexuality as a matter of silence and absence: “I didn't hear nothing from her the whole time. I didn't hear a thing from her” (p. 37). Unlike Sula and Corregidora, which explore absence as a source of power and freedom, Eva's Man and The Bluest Eye present black women who suffer from a culturally imposed negation of identity.

13. Jerilyn Fisher writes that black women writers of the 1970s “avoid the cliché of sexist—or feminist—stereotypes of Black women,” and prefer to expose the contradictions of black femininity. See Fisher, “From under the Yoke of Race and Sex: Black and Chicano women's Fiction of the Seventies,” Minority Voices 2, no. 2 (1978): 1. While seeming to differ from black feminist criticism that calls for positive images, Fisher, too, sets up a false opposition between complex, contradictory characterization and reductive, simplistic stereotypes. As Eva's Man illustrates, stereotypes can be the means of highly complex and contradictory explorations of black femininity.

14. Addison Gayle, Jr., “Blueprint for Black Criticism,” p. 43.

15. June Jordan, Review of Eva's Man, New York Times Book Review (May 16, 1976): 36.

16. Ibid., p. 37.

17. Addison Gayle, Jr., “Black Women and Black Men: The Literature of Catharsis,” Black Books Bulletin 4, no. 4 (1976): 50, 51.

18. John Leonard, in his review of Eva's Man, New York Times (April 30, 1976): C17, argues that the novel obliquely targets white racism as the source of the sexual black stereotype: “The whites took everything away from the Blacks but their sexuality, and the distortions of that sexuality are responsible for Eva.”

19. Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), pp. 96–97. Six years after the publication of Eva's Man, Gayl Jones seemed to have capitulated to the Black Aesthetic critique of her novel. In an interview with Charles Rowell in 1982, Jones said that in her current writing, she finds herself “wanting to back away from some questions. … I should mention that the male characters in those early novels are unfortunate, like the sexual theme—in this society that looks for things to support stereotypes.” See Rowell, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Callaloo 5, no. 3 (1982): 51.

20. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 267.

21. For a perceptive discussion of the reader’s entrapment in the novel’s structure, see Jerry R. Ward, “Escape from Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones,” in Black Women Writers, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor, 1984), pp. 249–52.

22. See Keith Byerman, “Black Vortex: The Gothic Structure of Eva's Man,” MELUS 7, no. 4 (1980): 93–101, for an extensive analysis of the sense of inevitability created by the “whirlpool” structure of the novel.

23. Roger Rosenblatt, Black Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 64.

24. Darryl Pinckney, Review of Eva's Man, The New Republic (June 19, 1976): 27.

25. Ann Allen Shockley argues that “the ideology of the sixties provided added impetus to the Black community’s negative image of homosexuality”; the lesbian, in particular, posed a “threat to the projection of Black male macho.” See “The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview,” Conditions: Five (1979): 85.

26. Unsigned review of Eva's Man, Publishers Weekly 209 (1976): 92.

27. Michael Cooke, “Recent Novels: Women Bearing Violence,” Yale Review 66 (1976): 92.

28. Addison Gayle, Jr., “Black Women and Black Men,” p. 50.

29. Roseann Bell, “Judgement: Addison Gayle,” in Sturdy Black Bridges, ed. Roseann Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: Anchor, 1979), p. 215.

30. Michael Harper, “Gayl Jones: An Interview,” in Chant of Saints, ed. Michael Harper and Robert B. Stepto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 361.

31. Margo Jefferson, “A Woman Alone,” Newsweek (April 12, 1976): 104; Larry McMurtry, Review of Eva's Man, The Washington Post (April 12, 1976): C5. Also see an unsigned review of the novel in Choice (September 1976): “The novel … is of interest only for its investigation into abnormal psychology. … It does not have the larger canvas and social perspective of her previous Corregidora” (p. 823).

32. Charles Rowell, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” p. 43.

33. Diane Johnson remarks that “Jones seems to record what people say and think as if it were no fault of hers. … Perhaps art is always subversive in this way.” See “The Oppressor in the Next Room,” The New York Times Review of Books (November 10, 1979): 7.

34. In eschewing the authority of realism, Eva's Man may be said to signify upon one of the founding motives of early black American narrative—the struggle to establish a credible and morally reliable black narrative voice. The narrating “I” of the slave narratives was constructed as a representative, transparent reflector of reality in order to authenticate the often surreal accounts of the horrors of slavery. Richard Yarborough, in “The First Person in Afro-American Fiction,” Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 105–21, writes that this same “abiding concern … with establishing the credibility of their literary voices and thus of their views of reality” motivated the avoidance of first-person narration in early black fiction (p. 111). Eva's Man, like several black novels published in the 1970s, employs an atypical, incredible first-person narrator as a gesture of revolt against the truth-telling imperative that was imposed on black writers by Black Aesthetic theorists.

35. Keith Byerman, “Black Vortex,” p. 99.

36. Charles Rowell, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” p. 37.

37. Robert Stepto argues, in “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives,” Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 300–22, that distrust of the reader and of literacy are primary reasons for the use of the oral storytelling model in black fiction (pp. 303–305). Stepto’s persuasive claim that the storytelling paradigm schools readers into the role of responsive and responsible listeners, and thereby serves a didactic function (pp. 309–10) is belied by the unusual function of the storytelling model in Eva's Man. Eva's distrust of the reader entails neither a hidden didactic intention nor an absent listener who may be responsive to such an intention.

38. Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work, p. 92.

39. John Wideman, “Defining the Black Voice in Fiction,” Black American Literature Forum 1 (1983): 81.

40. Melvin Dixon, “Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels of Gayl Jones,” in Black Women Writers, ed. Mari Evans, p. 237.

41. My reading of black dialect in the novel diverges from Valerie Gray Lee’s argument that black women novelists such as Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones use black folk talk as an effective medium for expressing the deepest feelings of their female protagonists. See “The Use of Folk Talk in Novels by Black Women Writers,” CLA Journal 23 (1980): 266–72. Eva's Man, in particular, shows black folk talk to be unamenable to feminine intentions; if anything, the novel bears out Roger Abrahams’s assertion that urban black dialect often displays a strong animosity toward and “rejection of the ‘feminine principle.’” See Deep Down in the Jungle (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), p. 32.

42. Michael Harper, “Gayl Jones: An Interview,” p. 359.