SOURCE: Aanerud, Rebecca. “Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature.” In Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Ruth Frankenberg, pp. 35-59. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Aanerud discusses the social, historical, and literary implications of “whiteness” in three works, including Kate Chopin's The Awakening.]

One of the signs of our times is that we really don't know what “white” is.

—Kobena Mercer, in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video

In our society dominant discourse tries never to speak its own name.

—Russell Ferguson, Out There: Marginality and Contemporary Art

RACIALIZING WHITENESS

The final lines of Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening unmistakably mark Edna as white: “The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long sweeping stroke.”¹ Yet despite this specificity of Edna's white subjectivity, little critical attention has been paid to her position as a white woman. Whiteness in the above passage is often understood to signal Edna's vulnerability, her innocence, even her purity associated with the rebirth to her true self. Certainly reading whiteness as such, although troublesome, is valid. I suggest, however, that whiteness has multiple meanings and significations, not the least of which is “race.” In 1985 Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that “until the past decade or so … race has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way,”² to which I would add that whiteness as race has yet to receive adequate critical consideration in the field of literary studies. It is not my intent to appropriate discussions of race in an effort to recenter white subjectivity. Rather, I want to call into question what white subjectivity is by contributing to the recent work of making visible the “constructed, and contested character of ‘whiteness.’”³ Far too often, when race as a category of analysis is invoked, its meaning and significance are construed in terms of nonwhiteness. A classic example of this is illustrated in the following passage in which Teresa de Lauretis responds to a question concerning the absence of a racial component—despite the interracial relationship between the two main characters (Agatha, a black Latina Brazilian, and Jo, a white U.S. American)—in her analysis of the film She Must Be Seeing Things. “I thought a lot about the inscription of race in the relationship between Agatha and Jo, but I concluded that the film intentionally focuses on the other aspects of their relationship. And though it makes it clear that the role of Agatha is marked by her cultural difference as a Brazilian, a black Latina, it doesn't address the racial difference between the women. So it's not that race is not a crucial issue in lesbian and feminist relationships, politics, and theory. It certainly is. But it is not represented as an issue in this film.”⁴ Race, in this quotation, is understood as racial difference located in the characters of color or in the dynamics between characters of differing racial backgrounds. It would seem that discussions of race are applicable only to those individuals, real or fictitious, who occupy a subject position other than white. Within such a scheme, being white is equated with being unraced—or, to stress the political, being normal.

In fact, all people live racialized lives. Jo's subjectivity is as racialized as Agatha's. As social beings we are each implicated in an interconnected series of hierarchical systems, of race, class, and gender among others. These systems are read onto our bodies, and we in turn interpret and are interpreted through our understandings and misunderstandings of them. Our awareness of these systems is partially informed by the degree of privilege or oppression we experience as a result of our positioning. While it might seem that race is something that affects only people of color, in fact race is a meaningful and fundamental factor in all lives.⁵ In film as well as literature race need not be an issue in order for it to be a relevant component. I am interested in expanding the theoretical discussions of race to include an examination of the constructions and representations of white subjectivity in literature. Relatedly, I wish to see how current power relations of gender, sexuality, race, and class are reproduced through the unspoken privilege of assuming racial neutrality.

This essay will take “whiteness” to be a socially and historically constructed category of racial identity. As such, whiteness cannot be understood as a singular entity, existing prior to or apart from other categories of identities. Its formation depends on the changing relations of gender, class, sexuality, and nationality. Thus, the meaning of whiteness, like all racialized identities in the United States, is not monolithic. Instead, its construction and interpretation are informed by historical moment, region, political climate, and racial identity.

As the epigraphs suggest, whiteness can be difficult to see. As Richard Dyer puts it, in a white supremacist nation, whiteness “secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular.”⁶ This is not to suggest that representations of whiteness are similarly obscure to all “seers.” In her article “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” bell hooks argues that not only do many black authors (and her students of color) see whiteness clearly, they represent it in a way not seen in the works of white authors, namely, whiteness as terrorizing. I would add that one's ability to see whiteness is equally influenced by his or her relationship to white dominant society as a whole. In other words, the varying abilities to “see” whiteness are as much a result of consciousness as they are of race.

However, despite the “real” relations of readers of American fiction to that body of literature, all readers, to draw from Toni Morrison, “until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, have been positioned as white.”⁷ From this position, whiteness as race operates as an unmarked racial category. Unless told otherwise, the reader, positioned as white, assumes the characters are white. (Un)marked whiteness is, of course, a type of marking. In an analysis of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, Morrison writes that she easily identifies Eddy as white: “We know he is because nobody says so.”⁸ Such (un)marked whiteness is often reinforced by the overt racial marking of the non-white characters.

Although the construction of whiteness depends on dynamic social, political, and historical factors, a predominant construction in American literature is undoubtedly whiteness as “unraced,” or racially neutral. This construction has significant political underpinnings. In this normative space, as Dyer argues, whiteness comes to stand for “the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human.”⁹ Occupation of this privileged position “is the source of its representational power … white domination is reproduced by the way white people ‘colonise the definition of normal.’”¹⁰ This essay seeks to unpack the construction of whiteness as the neutral way of being human through an examination of its representations in the literature of American authors. What are the various forms of whiteness in American literature? Or, as Toni Morrison asks, what is “the nature—even the cause—of literary ‘whiteness.’ What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as ‘American’?”¹¹ Here I will attempt to answer some of these questions by analyzing three works of American fiction by white authors: The Awakening, by Kate Chopin; “Blessed Assurance,” by Allan Gurganus; and Escape from Billy's Bar-B-Que, by Joanne Brasil.

I have chosen these three texts in part because in each case the author is a white person writing about whiteness. The importance of looking at the way white authors write whiteness is twofold. First, white writers are more likely to assume whiteness as a (non)racial norm. Understanding how whiteness functions as the unspoken norm is, I believe, a crucial part of challenging its domination. Second, white writers occasionally recognize whiteness as a racial category, and some even take it as their central theme; this is especially true of some post-civil rights texts. Here, I will consider what, if anything, is revealed about whiteness when white writers self-consciously locate whiteness.

To address the first concern, I will discuss The Awakening. Although Kate Chopin's novel initially met with criticism as a result of its apparent advocacy of female adultery, today it is securely positioned within the ranks of the canon of American literature. As such, it functions as a representative of much of American literature written by white authors: its characters are assumed to be white. My reading, then, calls for locating whiteness in the main characters and analyzing the role whiteness plays. To address the latter concern, I will examine two noncanonized works written with the intent of thinking about whiteness. Both racially locate the white characters as white, thus interrupting the predominant representation of whiteness as racially neutral. My discussion of these three texts will work toward the development of a critical reading practice that foregrounds the constructions and representations of whiteness and will challenge the way in which many texts by white U.S. authors are complicit with the discourses of white supremacy.

(UN)MARKED WHITENESS

In 1899 Kate Chopin published a novel about an unhappily married woman, Edna Pontellier. An upper-middle-class white woman and mother of two children, Edna lives a predictable and settled life with her husband, Léonce, in New Orleans. The opening scenes of the novel are set on an island off the Louisiana coast where the Pontellier family is vacationing. While on vacation Edna's dissatisfaction with her position in life crystallizes. Her marriage is empty. She feels distant from other women such as her friend Adèle Ratignolle, a woman perfectly happy as a wife and mother. And although feeling a kind of kinship with the pianist Mlle Reisz, Edna is hesitant to commit herself to the world of artistic expression and settles instead for dabbling in sketching. Her flirtatious friendship with Robert Lebrun advances to a love affair, which is, however, unconsummated. Robert leaves for business ventures in Mexico, and Edna returns to her life in New Orleans. In the space of nine months, Edna moves from an awareness of her dissatisfaction, to the awakening of her potential self, to the ultimate recognition that this world holds no place for that self. In the end she commits suicide by drowning.

Critical readings of The Awakening have examined, among other things, the paradoxes of Edna's womanhood.¹² Gender, often coupled with class, has been taken as the primary category from which to analyze Edna's status as wife and mother. Yet, can we so easily separate gender and race? Historian Vron Ware writes that “to be white and female is to occupy a social category that is inescapably racialized as well as gendered.”¹³ Instead of reading Edna's whiteness as incidental to her womanhood, I see it as inextricably tied to the construction of the feminine gender (understood especially as motherhood) and female sexuality (understood as Edna's desire), and I am interested in her struggle to find a space outside those constructions.¹⁴

The white characters in The Awakening are not overtly identified as white. Racially they are represented as normal or neutral. Nonetheless, and confirmed by Toni Morrison's method of white racial identification, they are white. Moreover, and true to the genre, characters of color are racially named: the quadroons, the little black girl, the dark women of Mexico, the mulattress. Although the white characters are not identified as occupants of a racially constructed social category, they are often described as having white skin. References to white skin and the imagery of white skin in Chopin's text not only reveal the main characters as white but are closely linked to the construction of motherhood and sexuality. During the early nineteenth century, motherhood and female sexuality were defined by piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity, or what is identified as the Cult of True Womanhood.¹⁵ Hazel Carby writes, “Within the discourse of the cult of true womanhood, wifehood and motherhood were glorified.”¹⁶ In truth, however, many women stood outside these glorified roles. Slave women in the antebellum South could expect neither the bonds of motherhood nor those of marriage to be respected by the white society.¹⁷ Hortense Spillers, for example, argues that within the traditional symbolics of feminine gender, where motherhood is understood as the right to claim a child, the primary social subject is the middle-class white woman.

Against the backdrop of motherhood, the imagery of white skin can be read as a gauge of the acceptance of that gender role. Although both Edna and Adèle are white, it is Adèle who is exceedingly white. She is initially described as “the fair lady of our dreams” (KC [Kate Chopin, The Awakening in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin], 888), with her spun-gold hair, her sapphire blue eyes, and her white neck. And later, when Edna visits Adèle at her home, it is “the rich, melting curves of her white throat” (KC, 937) that establish her extreme beauty and move Edna to muse about painting her friend. When the two women walked to the beach, it was Adèle who, “more careful of her complexion, had a twine of gauge veil about her head. She wore dogskin gloves with gauntlets to protect her wrists. She was dressed in pure white, with a fluffiness of ruffles that became her” (KC, 895). Likewise it is Adèle who excels at motherhood. Whereas Edna is “not a mother-woman,” Adèle is the type of woman who flutters about “with extended, protecting wings when harm, real or imagined, threatened [her] precious brood” (KC, 888). Adèle's protection of her precious brood is not unlike her protection of her perfectly white complexion. Both represent the comfort and security she finds in her social role. In contrast, the text establishes Edna as far less attentive to her white complexion. Her husband, in the opening scene, chastises her because she has not fully covered her arms while swimming and sunbathing: “You are burnt beyond recognition” (KC, 882). Similarly, Edna is less attentive to her children, who, we are told, would be more apt to wipe the water out of their eyes and go on playing than to run to their “mother's arms for comfort” (KC, 887). The imagery of Edna's darkened white skin represents ambivalence, even rejection, of the social category in which she is positioned.

If, as Spillers argues, some women stand outside the traditional symbolics of the feminine gender, other women stand inside them with varying degrees of complicity. Yet these degrees, especially in reference to motherhood, are slight. There is little room for variation. To be an ambivalent mother is to be a “bad” mother. A woman can occupy an oppositional position within the gender scheme,—as Mademoiselle Reisz does—but she must possess a “brave soul”, a “soul that dares and defies” (KC, 946). Edna Pontellier, unlike Mlle Reisz, is not a willing rebel in the gender scheme. Although she feels herself an outsider and is constructed as a kind of Other throughout the text—“She is not one of us; she is not like us” (KC, 900)—she initially struggles to be an insider. Her desire to paint, “to try herself on” her “fair companion” Adèle, who “was a tempting subject” (KC, 891), can be read as her desire to try to fit herself into the subject position of a contented wife and mother figure. It is not without frustration and discomfort that Edna finds herself unable to embrace the social category in which she is prefigured.

While whiteness functions overtly and is a central defining metaphor in the images of motherhood, it functions far more obliquely in the constructions and representations of sexuality. It is not defined by imagery of white skin or clothing; rather, its meaning is informed by the boundaries of nonwhiteness. The whiteness of Edna's sexuality is constructed in contrast to the dark women of Mexico and a “young barefooted Spanish girl,” Mariequita. Edna's flirtation with Robert Lebrun is fueled to sexual longing when he suddenly moves to Mexico. Her inability to express her feelings to Robert before he leaves is informed by the boundaries of her social role: “Edna bit her handkerchief, striving to hold back and to hide, even from herself as she would hide from another, the emotion which was troubling—tearing—her” (KC, 926). Her exaggerated longing for him after he leaves is supported by the racially constructed fear of those same boundaries: the Mexican women “with their dark black eyes and their lace scarfs” (KC, 985).

The stereotype of the exotic, the promiscuous, the earthy and accessible female Other in part constructs white female sexuality.¹⁸ Mariequita, with “her round, sly piquant face and pretty black eyes” and her “broad and coarse” feet, which she makes no attempt to hide (KC, 914), inspires both fear and longing in Edna. The gaze Edna focused earlier on Adèle is now turned to Mariequita: “She looked Mariequita up and down, from her ugly brown toes to her pretty black eyes, and back down again” (KC, 914). As Adèle represents unattainable motherhood, Mariequita represents unattainable sexuality.

The link between motherhood and sexuality is the site and substance of Edna's crisis as a white woman. Historically, white women's sexuality has been bridled by their role as mothers. In order for women to have esteem, value, and indeed power within white society, the role of mother must be maintained and honored. Moreover, the status and well-being of children reflect the success or failure of the mother. Mariequita's insouciant attitude in the story she tells of Sylvano's wife running off with Francisco and leaving all but one child behind represents a distant option for Edna. Barbara H. Solomon writes that “Edna could never adopt Mariequita's casual attitude toward marriage and infidelity, much as she struggles to escape the consequences of her unfortunate marriage to Léonce. Edna may not care whether her behavior hurts her husband, but she is haunted by her fear of harm she might cause her small sons, Etienne and Raoul.”¹⁹ Yet while Edna's position in the gender hierarchy is constraining, this constraint is offset by her position in the race and class hierarchies. Her abundant leisure time is made possible by women of color. As Anna Shannon Elfenbein comments, “the ubiquitous presence of dark women cushions everyday life for women of Edna's class.”²⁰ These women cook the meals, clean the rooms, and, most important, tend the children. The work of the “quadroons” makes Edna's mothering role tolerable, but also renders it, in effect, unnecessary. Unless Edna is able to embrace motherhood, as Adèle does, the sexual restrictions placed on her are meaningless because her function is and can be replaced by the work of hired hands. Edna's suicide is the inevitable outcome of her awakening. Her unsuccessful attempts to occupy a subject position other than her own—whether that of Adèle, the one satisfied through the fulfillment of her social category (white and female); or that of Mlle Reisz, the woman who dares to occupy the oppositional stance within the social category; or that of Mariequita, who lives outside the boundaries of that social category—reveal Edna's struggle to find a space within the limitations of her white and female subjectivity. Unable to find that space, Edna enters the water and swims to her death. Ironically, her death by drowning finds her that space of gendered whiteness by placing her securely within the symbolics of the nineteenth-century white female literary tradition.

This reading of The Awakening that foregrounds Edna's white subjectivity has three intended goals. The first is to call into question literary conventions, such as “marking,” which serve to maintain whiteness as the racially neutral category of identity. The second is to demonstrate how whiteness is represented through formal elements such as metaphor, imagery, and plot. The third goal, the farthest reaching of the three, is to interrupt conceptualizations of whiteness and race in general as essentialized. For example, the passages that contrast Edna and Adèle's attentiveness to protecting their white skin signify, as I argued above, their relative embrace of the mothering role. At the same time, and perhaps even more important, these passages reveal the social construction of whiteness itself. Adèle must work to preserve and reproduce her whiteness. The status of whiteness must be crafted and maintained through clothing, conduct, and attitude. Whiteness, like race in general, cannot be understood simply as a natural phenomenon. Rather, it is a highly orchestrated product of culture and nature. The recognition of whiteness as not a set condition of fact—that is, having white skin—but instead a product whose meaning and status must be sustained by a process of reproduction along preestablished lines is crucial to an interruption of whiteness as the status quo.

Reading whiteness into texts like The Awakening that are not overtly about race is an essential step toward disrupting whiteness as the unchallenged racial norm. Moreover, this critical reading practice will inevitably lead to a more complex and thoughtful understanding of whiteness and race in general. As readers of U.S. fiction and culture, we cannot avoid the politics of race that informs both the production and the reception of all texts. We must recognize that race is a vital and constant component of our literature even when all the characters are white. Of course, the recognition of race as a constant component does not mean that race must always be taken as the privileged component. I advocate situating Edna Pontellier as a white character not because I necessarily feel that race is the most important lens through which to view this text, but because she is a white character. Reading Edna as simply a woman, unraced and universal, erases the degree to which not only her whiteness but also her class position and her heterosexuality have everything to do with her frustration, her awakening, and her death. It also provides an opportunity to reexamine the initial controversy this novel inspired. As mentioned earlier, Chopin's apparently sympathetic rendering of female adultery contributed to the book's negative reception. However, if we consider The Awakening in the light of the period in which it was written, a period marked by the unprecedented lynching of black men, and if we further consider the “justifications” for these lynchings, we begin to see how the novel posed a threat beyond the potential loss of white male control of the female body. In her discussion of Ida B. Wells's campaign against lynching, Vron Ware writes: “As long as white women were seen to be the property of white men, without power or a voice of their own, their ‘protectors’ could claim to be justified in taking revenge for any alleged insult or attack on them. Whenever the reputation of white women was ‘tainted’ by the suggestion of immoral behaviour, it could always be saved by the charge that they had been victims of black lust.”²¹ Edna Pontellier is a white woman whose “immoral behavior” cannot be attributed to black male lust. As such her transgression threatens to destabilize not only the authority of white men over white women, but the authority of white men over black men. A reading that highlights Edna's whiteness places the novel solidly within national conversations and debates of race as well as gender, and demonstrates the degree to which these debates are intrinsically linked.

My reading draws heavily on the work of Russell Ferguson, who calls for “speaking the name” of dominant discourses as a necessary, albeit partial, means to challenging their authority. Unfortunately, this authority is not easily dismantled. The act of situating whiteness on the part of either the critic or the author himself or herself does not lead to a quick and easy reshuffling of power relations. It can, in fact, result in a reinscription of those power relations, as we shall see in the following section.

NAMING WHITENESS

Chopin's text, with its “unraced” white characters, is, as I suggested earlier, characteristic of much fiction written by U.S. white authors. Less typical are the texts by Allan Gurganus and Joanne Brasil. Each identifies the white characters as white, thus interrupting the predominant representation of whiteness. Instead of whiteness passing as an assumed norm, it is recognized as a particular racial category. Because both authors name their white characters as white, the reader's critical practice of situating whiteness is unnecessary. The goals of the reader are instead to analyze the meanings assigned to or associated with whiteness by examining its representations and constructions and, if possible, to assess what significance a self-conscious narrative can have in challenging white supremacy.

I have chosen the Gurganus and Brasil texts because each takes white guilt as a primary theme. In each text the central character undergoes a crisis associated with being white, and each illustrates a distinct strategy for attempting to resolve the crisis of white guilt. In the Gurganus text the crisis is negotiated through a series of rationalizations couched in a confessional narrative. In the Brasil text resolution is attempted by a gradual dismissal of race itself through a narrative marked by unrelenting simplicity.²²

The novella “Blessed Assurance” is from White People, a collection of stories by Allan Gurganus.²³ Recognizing the perplexing nature of whiteness, Gurganus takes it as his central theme: “This book is very much about the joys and limitations of being a white Protestant American. In color theory, white is the absence of all color. Isn't it weird; we named ourselves for what is not in the world? We're like a vacuum people, distanced from pleasure. So the drama of the book is people in quest of meaning and pleasure in their lives.”²⁴ This curious quotation is instructive to an analysis of Gurganus's work in two important ways. First, it sets up suffering as an outcome of being white. In interesting and certainly problematic ways, whiteness characterized as absent, empty, or that which is “not in the world” is prone to evade important considerations of power because far too often the privileges associated with being white are lessened, allowing the representation of white as victim to surface. Second, it sets meaning and pleasure as the goal of the characters' quests, when in fact the quests are less for meaning or pleasure than for innocence. In Gurganus's stories, meaning and pleasure for the white characters are deferred until innocence is secured. In his review of White People, Henry Louis Gates Jr. comments that “most of these stories are narrated by people who want some sort of forgiveness—it's what fuels their loquacity, speeds their confessions.”²⁵

Gates's critique is particularly apt for “Blessed Assurance,” a story about a white man of southern working-class origins who has achieved the American Dream. Through hard work, exploitation, white-skin privilege, and a healthy dose of denial, this man, Jerry, rose from the ranks of laborers to become a successful business owner and lawyer. Jerry, now reaching the age of retirement, tells the story of one of his first jobs. He collected funeral insurance payments from poor black people. As a working-class young man, his need for steady income overcame his reservations concerning the ethics of this work. He was willing to be convinced by his employer, who assured him that selling funeral insurance to people who barely had money for shelter was honest: “Soon as some next-of-kin comes in here with a legal death certificate, I pay off like clock work. So, yeah, it's honest … I see that look on your face. Only thing, buddy, if they miss two weeks running, they forfeit. They lose the present policy and any other Windlass ones they've paid up. I don't care if they've put in thousands, and several of your older clients will have: if they let one, then two (count them) two big Saturdays roll by, their pile becomes the company's” (BA [Allan Gurganus, “Blessed Assurance: A Morality Tale”], 235).

During the months that Jerry held this job he slowly came to know and care about the people along his route. Despite the warnings of his employer not to “carry” a customer for even one week, Jerry began to make payments for customers, eventually reaching a total of nine. After a number of weeks Jerry reluctantly admitted to his employer that the policies for numerous clients were being maintained not by their weekly payments but by his. By his admittance the clients lost their policies and their money was turned over to the company. Although Jerry held this job for only a brief time, now, as an aging man, he is plagued by guilt for having agreed to such employment. The story he tells is his attempt to explain, rationalize, and obtain forgiveness for his actions. My analysis of “Blessed Assurance” examines the various representations of whiteness and white guilt, analyzes the way in which whiteness is situated, and, most important, looks at the way Jerry's quest for innocence is misguided.

The novella opens with Jerry reflecting on his early years, which have come back to haunt him: “I sold funeral insurance to North Carolina black people. I myself am not black. Like everyone else who was alive fifty-nine years ago, I was young then, you know? I still feel bad about what went on. My wife says: telling somebody might help. Here lately, worry over this takes a percentage of my sleep right off the top.—So I'm telling you okay?” (BA, 232). With these opening lines two narrative elements are evident. First, the confessional mode is established whereby readers are situated not only as the hearers of Jerry's confession, but also as the healers of his guilt; and second, Jerry is situated as white. Although potentially disruptive to dominant discourses in which whiteness functions as the unnamed and unnameable norm, Jerry's situated whiteness remains problematic because he does not actually name himself as white; instead he marks his whiteness by saying he is “not black.” Gurganus's choice to have his character name his whiteness by not naming it could be read as an attempt to interrupt Morrison's “assumed whiteness” (we know characters are white because nobody says so); on the other hand, there is a reinscription of the assumption of whiteness. Readers are to assume that only a black person or a white person would sell funeral insurance to black people in the South, but certainly not a Latino/a, Korean American, American Indian—in short, any person of a racial identity other than black or white. Or perhaps, even further, we are to assume that in the United States there are really only two racial categories. If one is not black, one must be white. Further, not naming Jerry's whiteness underscores his shame of being a white person. It is as if he cannot bring himself to actually say the words that would unmistakably place him at the top of a racial hierarchy.

Following this initial representation of whiteness as shame come a number of other representations such as whiteness as authority and whiteness as guilt. Curiously, these two representations of whiteness occur along with opposite representations. For example, whiteness as the omniscient authority is paired with a representation of whiteness as empty or absent. Seen early in the text, whiteness as authority is marked as the ability to define the Other. The classic colonialist “those people” invoked unconsciously throughout Chopin's text is exposed and developed in Gurganus's. Jerry's clients are elderly black women whom he initially sees as the same, as “all one old black woman” (BA, 241). As Jerry develops a friendship with one of these women, Vesta Lotte Battle, a woman more than ninety years old who has invested heavily in insurance, the security he feels in his whiteness is shaken. His eventual friendships with numerous clients bring about an identity crisis constructed in racial terms: “The more vivid each dark person became, the blanker, blander and whiter I felt. A plug of stray cotton” (BA, 254). Jerry's transgressive act is his willingness to know the clients along his route as individuals. He pulls taffy with their grandchildren, helps out with odd jobs, and ultimately covers their insurance payments. Jerry goes against the “logic” of white supremacy, in which objectification of the Other is essential to a self-satisfied whiteness. Instead of Jerry's whiteness maintaining a claim to normalcy and possibly even full authorship of self and Other, he finds only emptiness and confusion, because whiteness, as he knows it, has meaning only when nonwhiteness is simplistic and undifferentiated.

The primary representation of whiteness, marked throughout the text, is guilt. Jerry's guilt seemingly stems from the funeral insurance job and his transition from working class to upper class, which stands in stark contrast to the lifelong poverty of the black women to whom he sold the insurance. But the true source of Jerry's guilt is located not in his actions but in his essentialized identity as a white person. We will examine the distinction between guilt located in identity versus guilt located in actions as we look closely at the confessional narrative employed by Gurganus.

As a literary technique the confessional narrative sets the stage for storytelling by way of flashbacks. And, as mentioned above, it functions to situate the reader as a potential exonerator of Jerry's guilt. Beyond the literary considerations of the use of a confessional narrative lies the cultural implication of a confession. Michel Foucault notes that the confession has become “one of the West's most highly valued technique for producing truth.”²⁶ However, the confessional narrative in “Blessed Assurance” functions not to bring about truth but to evade it, primarily because it is not, in fact, a confession at all, but rather a series of rationalizations. And like rationalizations in general, Jerry's function to explain the circumstances that informed his actions. Thus, Jerry's confession of collecting and selling funeral insurance is immediately followed by the details of his own humble beginnings. Like many people in his hometown, his parents worked in the local cotton mill. The long hours and poor working conditions at the mill eventually led to brown lung disease. Jerry assures us that he took the job selling funeral insurance only to finance his education in night school and to help pay for his parents' mounting medical bills: “See, I only did it to put myself through college. I knew it wasn't right” (BA, 232).

We learn that Jerry started making payments for some of his clients because he had come to genuinely care about them. He did not want to see them lose all their money to the insurance company because they were poor. His guilt is not associated with making the payments; rather, it arises from his decision to tell his boss that nine of his clients had been delinquent in their payments. Like the decision to take the job initially, this decision is explained and rationalized. It was a decision reached only after much pleading and many sleepless nights. First he tried to reason with his clients, arguing that he himself was poor: “Look, I'm poor too or else I wouldn't keep this job, believe me” (BA, 253). Finally, his own physical and emotional deterioration led his boss, Sam, to the conclusion that Jerry had been carrying customers: “Buddy? Something's off, right? College material like you, and with bags down to here. I'm seeing a wear-and-tear beyond normal wear of raking in their coins come Saturday. Know what Sam here's starting to think? Somebody's holding out on you, kid. You definitely got moochers. More'n one, too. Your face gives it away” (BA, 274). With his situation exposed, Jerry confessed to Sam and revealed the names of the nine clients in default.

Jerry's guilt does not rest simply on that one job, however. It encompasses the entire span of his career. He is especially guilt ridden about his remarkable financial success. His achievement, marked by material possessions such as businesses, homes, and trust funds for each of his children, brings him little comfort. It is again necessary to his confession to explain how someone like him became a wealthy man. In his characteristically humble and understated manner, Jerry explains his upward mobility as a combination of good luck, hard work, and “American ingenuity.” At the age of twenty-five Jerry inherited two laundromats from “a rich ill-tempered bachelor” for whom he worked. By age thirty-one he had made the Law Review at Duke University. A few years later he patented an invention that clinched his financial security: an adjustable coin plunger for commercial washers and dryers. In short, Jerry achieved the American Dream.

If we look closely at what Jerry's pseudoconfession has accomplished, we can see that, first, it has moved Jerry from an active participant in his own life to a victim of circumstances. The narrative functions to establish his voice as apologetic but powerless. In his search for innocence and redemption Jerry struggles to reduce his own subjectivity to just “a plug of stray cotton.” For a wealthy white man in North Carolina hoping to appease his guilt for selling useless insurance to poor black women, cotton is a loaded metaphor. The invocation of cotton links Jerry to a history of oppression in which he too is one of the oppressed. He empties himself of agency and attempts to believe that he is no more powerful than the black women to whom he sold funeral insurance so many years ago.

Second, the confession has moved the construction of whiteness from guilt to innocence. We are left wondering what exactly Jerry did that was so wrong. Certainly the insurance collection job was not wholly ethical; by his own admission he knew it was wrong. Yet his circumstances were difficult. The narrative maneuvers the reader into Jerry's dilemma by suggesting that most people, regardless of racial identity, would have done the same had they been in Jerry's shoes. This shift from guilt to innocence is predicated on the false assumption that a white person who does not participate in “extreme” racist acts (e.g., by belonging to a white supremacist group or subscribing to white supremacist ideology) is not racist. Despite this move from guilt to innocence, at the completion of his “confession” Jerry still seems unconvinced and again looks to the reader for reassurance: “Hey, I appreciate your listening. Really. I don't know—I've kept fretting over this, feeling it for all these years. I mean, basically I'm not all that bad of a man, am I? Am I?” (BA, 305).

This final appeal reveals that Jerry's sense of guilt stems not from what he has done but from what he is: a white person. The narrative which starts with a focus on acts, ends with a focus on identity. This critical shift from acts to identity is the inevitable result of a narrative that labors to establish the fact that Jerry has not really done anything wrong, leaving only his whiteness as the source of his guilt. Ultimately, the meaning of whiteness in “Blessed Assurance” depends on an essentialization. Whiteness is equated with and reduced to having white skin. This essentialization allows for a separation of identity from actions, leading the healer/reader to conclude that Jerry cannot be guilty for something that is beyond his control; that is, the “biological fact” of his white skin. The representation of whiteness and white guilt in “Blessed Assurance” is based on the false supposition that a clear distinction between identity and actions can, in fact, exist. This representation functions powerfully in current debates on race and racism in U.S. culture today. It is often used as a justification for white people to avoid examining racism because associating the concept of “guilt” with something beyond one's control makes no sense. I am not arguing that guilt ought to be associated with something beyond one's control. I am arguing that the rationale behind this representation of white guilt is flawed because it is based on an essentialized whiteness as opposed to a socially constructed whiteness.

For Jerry, the misconceptualization of guilt is characterized by his obsession to negotiate himself out of the position of “self as bad.” There are various strategies for shedding guilt as a white person. They range from a denial of the historical and present-day reality of racial discrimination to a full acknowledgment of both the historical and current realities of racism and a willingness to accept accountability for those realities by challenging the power structures that ensure their continuance. The strategy Jerry employs falls between these two extremes. Although willing to concede the profound existence of racism, Jerry is not able to move beyond his own self-centering guilt. Instead of confronting his guilt as a means of dismantling its paralyzing effects, he seeks to evade it by confessing that he feels truly bad and rationalizing his actions as consequences of youth and economic need. Through the construction of an innocent whiteness, perhaps even a maligned whiteness, Jerry comes to stand for a kind of innocent white man who, through no fault of his own, is positioned as a beneficiary of a system that hands out privilege to some and oppression to others.

Joanne Brasil's text constructs whiteness and white guilt much as Gurganus's text does, but Brasil employs a different strategy for negotiating the crisis generated by whiteness.

As with “Blessed Assurance,” whiteness in Escape from Billy's Bar-B-Que is characterized by guilt and an underlying sense of anxiety.²⁷ Whiteness is acknowledged rather than assumed, but the privileges that go hand in hand with whiteness are evaded. Being white for the novel's female protagonist, Cecyl, is a source of confusion and conflict. Cecyl's confusion makes her an apt counterpart to Jerry. However, her narrative voice is less savvy; it is a voice marked by unrelenting naïveté. Moreover, throughout the novel Cecyl's prevailing construction is as an outsider to the social orderings of race, class, sexuality, and gender. Taken together, the outsider position and the naive voice function to ensure a place of innocence in the U.S. racial scheme. Unlike Jerry, who seeks the space of innocence through his narrative, Cecyl's narrative presumes innocence and thus attempts to speak from that most privileged of positions—objectivity.

The novel chronicles Cecyl's experiences as a young white girl living in the South. Southern racism, which seems to go unnoticed by other whites, horrifies her. Under the impression that racism is a southern phenomenon, Cecyl moves to the North. Although the North does not turn out to be the liberal, prejudice-free land she had envisioned, she remains there and takes advantage of the many experiences—personal, political, and academic—available to young white women during the late 1960s. Eventually she returns to the South and finds an environment of racial harmony. As with Gurganus's text, my analysis of Escape from Billy's Bar-B-Que examines the way whiteness is situated in the text and looks at the various representations of whiteness and white guilt.

The narrative begins by explicitly situating the black/white dichotomy in Cecyl's hometown, Phoebus, Virginia: “Since they still had racial segregation then (which they still do now, of course), they needed to have two barber shops and two bar-b-que places so they could keep all the Black people and White people separate. They had two grocery stores too, but everyone was allowed to shop at both of them. I don't know why. The White people just said that that's the way you were supposed to do it” (EBB [Joanne Brasil, Escape from Billy's Bar-B-Que], 1). Cecyl's racialized subject position stands somehow outside the constructions of “all the Black people and White people.” As in the Gurganus text, there seem to be only two racial categories. Cecyl goes on to describe Big Mamma's Barbershop, which is located across the street from Billy's Bar-B-Que (owned by Cecyl's father). Because Big Mamma's is the town's black barbershop, it is off-limits to Cecyl, although she spends much of her time watching the dancing and fun that spontaneously occur on the (O)ther side of the street. Her spectatorship of this Otherness reveals a marked contrast to her own environment at Billy's, which is described as thoroughly normal: “Everything was normal. Normal formica tables, normal chrome chairs, and a row of normal stools” (EBB, 2). The construction of whiteness as boring and knowable is difficult to miss, especially in contrast to the highly stereotypic characterization of blackness.

Through Cecyl's frank and direct narration the novel explores her ambivalence about being white. She contrasts herself with her friend Betty: “One thing about Betty Baines, she was never confused, especially when it came to being White. She knew just what to do. The thing was, Betty took it for granted that she was White. … I didn't have that same feeling of Whiteness that other White people seemed to have” (EBB, 7). Cecyl's ambivalence toward whiteness reinforces her supposed position as an outsider to the racial order of the South. This positioning in part stems from her family's Irish immigrant status and suggests a construction of whiteness that depends on a long history of racial inclusions and exclusions in defining American citizenship.²⁸ Feeling white, for Cecyl, is linked to an awareness of the history of white supremacy. Her discomfort and confusion are clear as the narrative recounts a lesson about slavery: “The worst trouble started in sixth grade. Our teacher, Mrs. Matt, gave us a lesson on slavery in the Old South. In order to be as ‘unbiased’ as possible, Mrs. Matt carefully divided the blackboard into two equal parts. On the one side we were supposed to list the ‘bad’ things about slavery in the Old South, and on the other side, we were supposed to list the ‘good’ things about it” (EBB, 6). Cecyl's best friend, Betty, offers the first good thing (“It Christianized the African heathens”) and is praised by the teacher. For Cecyl, “the worst trouble” refers less to slavery being taught as possibly having good qualities than to her own estrangement from white people and “being white.” She sees herself and other whites as benefiting from white-skin privilege, but unlike the others she is not comfortable with feeling that this privilege is deserved. For every white person in the South but Cecyl, feeling white carries with it the feeling of superiority to anyone who is not white. This feeling of whiteness as superiority is for her the source of ambivalence and discomfort. In an attempt to alleviate (and escape) her racially constructed identity conflict, Cecyl migrates to Boston.

The novel unfolds chronicling Cecyl's various northern adventures: living with her black boyfriend, Crawdaddy; moving in with hippies; doing antiwar work and other 1960s-related activities; and finally marrying Mario, a Latino jazz musician from Brazil. The text continues to mark whiteness overtly as a racialized social category complicated by markings of sexuality, gender, class, and regional awareness. Despite these complications, the narrating voice of Cecyl remains remarkably simplistic and naive. This relentless simplicity becomes particularly apparent as Cecyl describes her first sexual relationship, in which her occupation of a racially gendered body reveals minimal agency: “Somehow or other I got to be Crawdaddy's girlfriend. I don't know how that happened. … I was just going with him just to be polite in case he thought I was prejudiced. Then I just started getting used to him, and then I got to like him and got a crush on him. It was embarrassing, but I didn't know how someone was supposed to act when they were someone's girlfriend, especially if it was a person of the opposite race's girlfriend I was supposed to be being” (EBB, 20).

The representation of Cecyl's naive white femininity, while striking, is not without precedent. In her analysis of films about Britain's colonial past, social historian Vron Ware identifies three white female types: the good, the bad, and the foolhardy. The good represents a character who is spiritually opposed to all injustice but is powerless. She is “destined to suffer because she feels so deeply.”²⁹ The bad represents “the uncomplicated attitude of the wife” who enjoys imperialist trappings and disdains “natives” and colonial settings. The foolhardy has feminist inclinations signified by her unwillingness to conform; however, she is thoroughly naive about the privileged position she occupies. She is often involved in an interracial sexual relationship that has the potential to bring about her death. The tragic ending can be read not only as an obvious warning against such transgressions but also as reinstating the purity and victim status of her white womanhood. Ware's foolhardy type finds apt representation in Cecyl. As a heterosexual white female character who has not examined her own racism, Cecyl's most powerful means of expressing her unwillingness to conform to American racism is through an interracial relationship. True to her character, this expression seems to be accidental rather than the result of misguided agency or desire.

Brasil's representation of Cecyl's white sexuality via Crawdaddy is consistent with a Western and white aesthetic tradition in which characters of color often function as catalysts of the white characters' sexuality. Although Cecyl's second sexual relationship, with Mario, is also interracial, its construction varies significantly from the construction of the preceding relationship in that race as a marker of difference is invoked only briefly through tropes such as his national identity, his Spanish accent, and his interest in jazz. Ultimately, race and the racial difference between Cecyl and Mario fall out of the narrative completely. The absence of any attention to race or racial differences is striking in a narrative that previously marked race so clearly.

The fact that race remains central to Cecyl's relationship with Crawdaddy yet becomes all but nonexistent with Mario has some intriguing implications. One implication, in accordance with a white liberal ideology, is that race and racism are not issues for Cecyl in her relationship with Mario because they are truly in love. They interact with each other as “individuals,” not as members of different races. This shift from “race matters” to “race doesn't matter” foreshadows the idealism of the novel's ending: despite the lack of any structural or institutional changes, racism disappears.³⁰

A second, and perhaps more powerful, implication is the reinscription of the black/white racial paradigm articulated early in the novel. Race matters and is central to Cecyl's relationship with Crawdaddy but not with Mario because, as is also true in Gurganus's text, there are only two racial categories of any significance. As a result, race and racial difference are constant factors in the relationship between Cecyl and Crawdaddy but not between Cecyl and Mario. As a Latino, Mario does not fit into either of the two racial categories that frame Cecyl's narrative. He stands outside Cecyl's simplistic black/white dichotomy and like herself is constructed as “raceless” by the narrative.

Like Gurganus's Jerry, Cecyl attempts to negotiate a space where she can maintain a clear conscience despite her white-skin privilege. For both characters the “problems of whiteness” are located in narratives about race. However, constructions of race are always entangled with other constructions of identity. For example, the solutions to the crisis generated by “whiteness as bad” are informed by gender and articulated through the racialized gendered body. The history of the white female body as a commodity of exchange sets the stage for a reading of Cecyl's relationship with Crawdaddy as an attempt to “buy” a kind of “antiracism,” or at the very least a nonconformist position in U.S. racism. Moreover, her gender constructs a plausible “innocence” for Cecyl, who, unlike Jerry, does not occupy a position of privilege via both gender and race. Although Jerry's climb up the economic and class ladders was far from easy, he had both his gender and his race working for him rather than against him. It is, of course, his remarkable upward mobility that contributes to his sense of guilt at having participated in the exploitation of others. Cecyl, on the other hand, cannot rely on her gender to work for her in the pursuit of economic success; this, compounded with her “outsider” position to a racial ordering and her ready naïveté, allows her to believe that she does not participate in the systematic exploitation of others. Thus, she has little need of the confessional narrative. Instead, her search for a clear racial conscience is expressed through a narrative marked by the absence of history and a lack of awareness of power relations.

In the end, Cecyl returns to the South and finds the racial relations of her town magically transformed. While Cecyl is helping her father at Billy's Bar-B-Que, Big Mamma enters: “She just walked in so matter of factly and ordered a bar-b-que sandwich and a coke. Billy stopped and told her a stupid joke” (EBB, 135). After Big Mamma leaves, Cecyl asks Billy why Big Mamma came in to get a sandwich when she never did before. Her father simply tells her, “It's the new days now, honey. It's the new days” (EBB, 135). With this line the novel ends. Through this assimilation narrative racism is resolved by the Other becoming “just like us.” (Big Mamma comes over to Billy's place, not the other way around.) It is no longer necessary for Cecyl to “feel bad” or to position herself as an outsider. In the text racism ceases to be a problem because race itself seems to have disappeared.

As with the Gurganus text, Brasil's text generates a number of questions. With my epigraphs from Kobena Mercer and Russell Ferguson in mind, I see two questions in particular emerge. First, does Brasil's attempt to situate whiteness reveal characteristics of whiteness? Second, does the situated whiteness of the text interrupt the normative position white characters have occupied in much of American fiction? Certainly Brasil's text does reveal something of the characteristics associated with whiteness, albeit a fairly essentialized whiteness. Whiteness is cast as boring, bad, knowable, and somehow unchanging. Also important, and related to the second question, whiteness represents “the normal.” So, while the situated whiteness does interrupt the normative position of white characters in these examples of American fiction, it does not interrupt a construction of whiteness as normal. Paradoxically, it reinscribes this position. We can see this reinscription most clearly in the regular use of stereotypic names such as Big Mamma and Crawdaddy for the characters of color, and markers such as jazz associated with Cecyl's transition to sexual adulthood. In her introduction to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison discusses the association of certain “racialized” metaphors to the white imagination: “I was interested, as I had been for a long time, in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them.”³¹ She goes on to say that “neither blackness nor ‘people of color’ stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, or anarchy, or routine dread.”³² And while Morrison could rely on these established tropes, she chooses not to. Moreover, she offers the challenge to other writers to likewise decide against the use of such metaphors. Brasil's use of these tropes could, on the one hand, be read as a deconstruction of stereotypes. Their use, after all, is remarkably blatant. However, she never fully, or even partially, problematizes these terms. As a result, their function is more in accordance with Morrison's analysis than representative of a new direction in fiction taken by a white writer.

The attempt by Gurganus and Brasil to take whiteness seriously both as a racial category and as a theme is indicative, I believe, of some inroads to social change. The fact that both texts have central characters who exhibit considerable insecurity about what it means to be white is a distinctly post-civil rights phenomenon. Race anxiety is not a new topic for white authors of American fiction; however, the traditional focus has been on loss of supremacy as a result of miscegenation rather than the white characters' personal doubts about their own whiteness. Do these texts present formidable challenges to white supremacy? Probably not. As I have stated earlier, the act of situating whiteness either on the part of the critic or on the part of the author does not lead to a quick reshuffling of power relations. Nonetheless, I believe that a critical reading of these texts does contribute to our understanding of the complexities associated with whiteness as a racial category and thereby challenges a monolithic notion of whiteness and a construction of whiteness as the ordinary and inevitable way of being human.

CONCLUSION

In this essay I have argued for the study of race and literature to include a focus on whiteness as race. This inclusion necessarily involves a disruption of whiteness as the racially neutral category in much of American fiction by white authors. I have advocated two kinds of readings. The first examines texts in which the characters are assumed by both the author and the reader to be white. Only characters of color in these texts are racially marked, leaving the white characters unraced and thus reinforcing whiteness as the assumed norm. The second reading examines texts by white writers that do racially mark the white characters and take whiteness as a primary theme. The texts I have chosen to examine in this essay span a period of seventy-five years; like all texts they are products of the historical and regional cultures in which they were written. While the reading I offer of Chopin's Awakening is one that I believe is applicable to a text written at almost any point in U.S. history because the representation of whiteness as racially neutral on the part of white writers has largely been a constant, I am not arguing for an ahistorical reading practice. The political beliefs and investments of and the historical and regional influences on white authors ultimately inform the representation of whiteness in their texts. For instance, Chopin's particular milieu as well as her conscious or unconscious views on race inevitably shaped the construction of whiteness in her novels and short stories.³³ My readings of the Gurganus and Brasil texts highlight the historical period in which they were written because the practice of marking whiteness as a racial category is directly linked to the post-civil rights racial climate.

Between the time that this essay was originally conceived and written and the time of going to press there has been growing interest in the critical analysis of whiteness. This blossoming of interest will hopefully continue to push us to see the ways that “race” is an ever present component in American literature—even when all the characters are white. An expanded critical analysis of our literature not only provides a new avenue to the study of American fiction but also gives readers and writers alike another tool with which to challenge that which all too often passes as the norm, whether it be in terms of race, class, or sexuality.

Notes

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, in The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, 2 vols., ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 1000. Further references in the text are cited as KC.

2. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Editor's Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 2.

3. Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Thing and the Homoerotic Imaginary,” in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 206.

4. Teresa de Lauretis, “Film and the Visible,” in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle: Bay Press), 268.

5. For a full discussion and analysis of this point see Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

6. Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29, no. 4 (1983): 44.

7. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), xii.

8. Ibid., 72.

9. Dyer, “White,” 44.

10. Ibid., 45.

11. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 9.

12. See essays in Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou, ed. Lynda S. Boren and Sara deSassaure Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Bernard Koloski, Approaches to Teaching Chopin's “The Awakening” (New York: MLA, 1988); Wendy Martin, New Essays on “The Awakening” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

13. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (New York: Verso, 1992), xii.

14. I would draw readers' attention to Michele A. Birnbaum's “‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonialization of Race,” American Literature 66, no. 2 (1994): 301-23. Birnbaum's excellent reading of the functions played by the characters of color in Chopin's novel brings into sharp relief the centrality of Edna's whiteness. However, Birnbaum's claim that “there is no racial or ethnic presence in the final scene on the beach” (316)—a claim presumably made because only Edna is present—in effect reinscribes the racially neutral position of whiteness in American literature. It is this very neutrality of whiteness that my reading calls into question and disrupts.

15. See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly (Summer 1966): 152; and Linda M. Perkins, “The Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ on the Education of Black Women,” Journal of Social Issues 39, no. 3 (1983): 18.

16. Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 26.

17. For discussions on the status of motherhood for black women in the nineteenth-century United States, see Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (Summer 1987): 65-81; Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985).

18. Patricia Hill Collins writes of the debilitating effects of this stereotype for black women in Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1991). Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); and White, Ar'n't I a Woman? engage similar discussions and include analyses of the resulting hostility and envy of white women toward black women.

19. Barbara H. Solomon, “Characters as Foils to Edna,” in Approaches to Teaching Chopin's “The Awakening,” ed. Bernard Koloski (New York: MLA, 1988), 116.

20. Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 147.

21. Ware, Beyond the Pale, 182.

22. Because the Gurganus and Brasil texts are not as well known as The Awakening, the following analyses include more extensive background and plot information.

23. Allan Gurganus, “Blessed Assurance: A Morality Tale,” in White People (New York: Ivy Books, 1990). Further references in the text are cited as BA.

24. Gurganus, “Blessed Assurance,” 10.

25. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Art and Ardor,” Nation, 493.

26. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978), 59.

27. Joanne Brasil, Escape from Billy's Bar-B-Que (Navarro, Calif.: Wild Trees, 1985). Further references in the text are cited as EBB.

28. For a discussion of the often uncertain and ambiguous position Irish Americans occupied in terms of whiteness, see David R. Roediger, “Irish-American Workers and the White Racial Formation in the Antebellum United States,” in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); and Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control (New York: Verso, 1994).

29. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale, 232.

30. Writers Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield refer to this shift as the phenomenon within liberal racial thinking to go “beyond race” in their article “White Philosophy,” Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 737-57. See also Bob Blauner, “White Radicals, White Liberals, and White People: Rebuilding the Anti-Racist Coalition,” in Racism and Anti-Racism in World Perspective, ed. Benjamin P. Bowser (London: Sage, 1995).

31. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, viii.

32. Ibid., x.

33. Given that her husband was a member of the White League, a prowhite organization, it is unlikely that she had not considered her own position on questions of race.

My thanks to Carolyn Allen, Ruth Frankenberg, Nancy Hartsock, Susan Jeffords, Tamara Kaplan, Diana Paulin, F. Winddance Twine, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and Kevin Aanerud for their thoughtful readings and helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.