Neurasthenia

Martha Gilman Bower. "Color Struck" under the Gaze: Ethnicity and the Pathology of Being in the Plays of Johnson, Hurston, Childress, Hansberry, and Kennedy. Contributions to Afro-American Studies #208. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 170 pp. $49.95.

Martha Gilman Bower's study "Color Struck" under the Gaze analyzes the "ethnicity and the pathology of being" in the lives and plays of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Adrienne Kennedy. For the psychological concepts the author relies heavily on the ideas and theories of R. D. Laing (The Divided Self, 1960, and The Politics of Experience, 1967); on Tom Lutz's ideas about neurasthenia (American Nervousness, 1991); on Michel Foucault's theory about the "clinical gaze" (The Birth of the Clinic, 1973); on Barbara Johnson's The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender (1998); on Toril Moi's Sexual Politics (1988); and on some of Jacque Lacan's theories.

The author analyzes Georgia Douglas Johnson's Plums, Blue Blood, Bronze, A Sunday Morning in the South, Blue-Eyed Black Boy, and Safe; Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck, Dust Tracks on a Road (her autobiography), The First One, Jonah's Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, "Spunk," some of her research on voodoo and folklore, and some of her revues; Alice Childress's Wedding Band, Wine in the Wilderness, Trouble in Mind, and Florence; Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and her memoirs in To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, as well as the unfinished Toussaint; Adrienne Kennedy's Funny House of a Negro, The Owl Answers, A Rat's Mass, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, and Sleep Deprivation Chamber.

This is a respectable list of plays by African American women although it does not include such plays by early African American women as Eulalie Spence's "Cruiter," Thelma Duncan's The Death Dance, Angelina Grimke's Rachel, Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Mine Eyes Have Seen, Mary Burrill's They that Sit in the Darkness, or Myrtle Smith Livingstone's For Unborn Children. Clearly Bower has limited her selection of writers and plays to fit the scope of her approach.

This book is likely to be controversial because of her reliance on R. D. Laing's ideas inasmuch as his concepts and theories are no longer in much favor. Secondly, this study might create controversy among literary critics of drama because Bower tries to psychoanalyze or at least apply psychoanalytic concepts to fictive characters. I take it that one can apply such concepts to living people, the authors of these plays, because one can ask them questions and receive answers. But because a character in a play is fixed forever in time, place, and speech, it remains an author's fictive construct. One can ask, though it seems useless, does Hamlet want to have sex with his mother? One can even ask if the characters of "Friends" or of "Jerry Seinfeld" are schizoid. But such questions do not constitute literary or dramatic criticism. As a consequence it seems to me that Bower pushes her thesis pretty far and thereby risks the value of what she has to say.

Bower approaches black female characters as though they were living people who have "personality problems" brought on by living in a culture that values "appearances, color, religion, speech deviations"; she compares them to late 19th-century Irish immigrants (real people) who suffered schizophrenia and clinical depression (1). She postulates that the characters in these plays suffer from "division of self" and become "schizophrenic, depressed, paranoid, and neurasthenic" (2). They are used not only by black men and women but also by a "white male hierarchy and gaze" (2). The result is that most of the female characters who are "mulattas," that is, of mixed race ancestry, as are their authors, are subject to what she calls a "gaze": One sees that they are neither "all black" nor "all white" and thus they cannot enter fully into the mainstream of either blacks or whites.

Vaguely conceding Laing's idea that the modern self is opposed to an imprisoning and internalizing social reality (5), Bower poorly defines modern society as compartmentalized and fragmented. She asserts that the characters in the plays desire the "Almighty Father" (7), may miss one, want one, or suffer because they have none. This father-focus seems to boil down to her statement that for these characters life on earth (black life in a white world) is "empty of worth" (7). How life can be empty for a fictive construct I do not understand. But the author supports this thesis with Toril Moi's ideas that sexual difference is "based on the visibility of difference" (7). The eye determines the truth of a thing, the underlying concept of the "white gaze" on the characters' black skins (8). This idea is also related to Michel Foucault's "theory of the clinical gaze" (9). Both whites and blacks are "color struck." Clearly for the author "the gaze" in the plays "is a reductive one" (9). These concepts underlie the psychological behavior of the characters, revealing the "division of self" in modern society, the depth of hate underlying love.

For Bower, the mixed race characters suffer from paranoia stemming from their victimization--as in Adrienne Kennedy's plays, which Bower argues "epitomize the traumas, nightmares, and psychoses" of black people as "criminal, thief, rapist, liar" (135). Apparently, all of the characters depicted in these plays "suffer from this white gaze." However valid this contention might be with respect to the playwrights, I find it to be too biased to provide much insight into the dramatic nature of the plays, many of which are fine dramas. For example, the author ignores the powerful myths and their associations that often dominate Adrienne Kennedy's plays and provide the core of her plays' meanings. In The Owl Answers, the owl is the controlling metaphor, on one level symbolizing evil omens and darkness, but in association with the fig tree, it anchors the heroine's identity with the sexual world of her black and white parents and her many self-images.

The problem of identity for Kennedy's She is an internal one albeit externalized by the metaphor of the owl conjoined with the mythic qualities of the fig tree. The owl is a symbol from a faith system of non-believers in the Judeo-Christian God, a messenger of witches, a harlot of the night, an epiphany of Athena (goddess of wisdom), the baker's daughter who begrudged Christ; its hooting cry is the call of death, the cry of a woman who died in childbirth. Clearly, Kennedy anchors She's identity as a fictive character in the world of folklore and legend. In the white world the owl has one set of associations; in the world of myths it has another set of meanings. (1)

In effect, both images "enable Kennedy to dramatize the intellectual black woman's search for meaning in a white culture that supplies her with no ancestral or sacred roots" (Tener 3). I cannot see She as being schizophrenic or as having inherited that which causes her to be so. She is a fictive device that Kennedy uses to explore the many internal states of feeling that an intellectual woman may have, none of which imply that the character is paranoid, depressed, or whatever. Similarly, in Funny House of a Negro the controlling metaphors are the bald head and the wild kinky hair of the fictive characters. In Barbara G. Walker's The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, there are many myths and legends associated with both images, enough to suggest that again Kennedy has anchored this play in the world of myths and power as well as in the world of white culture.

It would have been quite instructive if Bower had examined the plays more closely as drama rather than as psychological studies. For me the value of this study lies more in what she has to say about the playwrights than in what she attributes to the characters. For those interested in psychoanalysis, this study is an interesting one; for those interested in drama, it raises controversy.

Notes

(1.) See Robert L. Tener, "Theatre of Identity: Adrienne Kennedy's Portrait of the Black Woman," Studies in Black Literature 6 (1975): 1-5.

Robert L. Tener

Kent State University

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