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Article Excerpt
This essay analyzes the black female body as a source of intraracial class conflict, uncovering parallels between West's heroine, social climber Cleo Judson, and her sister, compulsive eater Charity Reid. West links the sisters by their appetites, which the black bourgeoisie sought to repress in their quest for respectability.
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Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy continues to receive scant critical attention in studies of both the African American novel and Harlem Renaissance women's writing, despite the praise the novel garnered when it was published. (1) West's work, as Cherene Sherrard-Johnson explains, shares with a number of other black women writers of the Thirties and Forties a "resist [ance] [to] the stylistic or thematic assumptions presumed by periodization" (610), and, thus, is often absent from discussions of both Harlem Renaissance women's writing and the mid-century African-American novel. West's fiction seemed almost self-consciously out of step with the vernacular and proletarian aesthetics of its literary moment; for example, while Ann Petry's best-seller The Street portrays the struggles of single mother Lutie Johnson against the forces of racism, sexism, and poverty of wartime Harlem, West depicts the social ambitions of black bourgeois heroine Cleo Judson to enter the cloistered elite of black Boston. Part satire, part realism, and part novel of manners, The Living Is Easy defies categories of genre as well as those of period, leading critics to dismiss its stylistic complexity: as Robert Bone writes, "serious difficulties on the narrative level prevent the novel from realizing its full potential" (190). Resolutely personal in an era in which Richard Wright and others argued for the effects of social forces on the construction of black identity, the novel portrays the implosion of a black middle-class household due largely to its heroine's own aspirations. Much like the works Claudia Tate analyzes in Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, West's fiction refuses to "subordinate [...] expressions of private longing to racial politics" (11), relegating it to a secondary place in the canon of twentieth-century African-American fiction.
Chief among the novel's intimate subject matter is an analysis of the role of the black female body as a tool of middle-class assimilation. As in the work of Edith Wharton, whose novels The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country serve as intertexts for West's depiction of the conflict between social climbers and the black aristocracy, West demonstrates how black middle-class women must craft personae based on the external characteristics of physical beauty, skin colour, and costume to gain access to elite social milieus. A light-skinned, ambitious Southern migrant to New England in the 1890s, Cleo Jericho marries Bart Judson, a self-made entrepreneur twenty-three years her senior, to avoid a probable rape at the hands of her white employer. After their marriage, Cleo and Bart move to Boston, where Bart develops a successful career in the produce business. As the Judsons' success continues to mount, Cleo is desperate to reunite with her three sisters, whom she had left behind when she left the South as a young woman. Cleo invites them for a visit to her Boston home, and then engineers the collapse of their marriages to ensure that they will stay, along with their children. While the climax of the novel shows Cleo at the height of her social and personal success, having penetrated the inner circle of black Boston and reunited her family, the Judsons' fortunes begin a sharp decline with the advent of World War I. Bart's business fails as the war continues, Cleo's sisters realize the extent of her betrayal, and Cleo learns the hollowness of her achievement.
Much like Undine Spragg, heroine of The Custom of Country, Cleo gains access to the inner circle through her mastery of the theatrical apparatus of assimilation, using her imitative skills to claim a place among the elite. Unlike Undine, however, who grows increasingly stout with her successful penetration of Old New York society, Cleo remains slender, bearing no traces of the overindulgence in which both she and Undine engage. (2) Through her depiction of Cleo, West displays her preoccupation with the management of the black bourgeois body, as Cleo preserves her femininity from male predations and instructs the children of the household in the protocols of physical restraint.
However, Cleo's penchant for physical self-control has a powerful anti-exemplar in her sister, Charity Reid, the first compulsive overeater in African-American fiction. As Cleo ascends the social ladder of black Boston, Charity becomes morbidly obese, a monument to the cost of Cleo's drive for middle-class respectability. In its contrasting constructions of the black female body, West's novel offers a pivotal example of what Helena Michie calls "sororophobic contrasts," the complex play of identification and disidentification between women, in which one woman often moves toward agency at the expense of the other. As Michie notes, white feminists have often overlooked such contrasts in African-American fiction, essentializing black female experience by considering African-American women as versions of each other (Sororophobia 139). "Sororophobic contrasts" lie at the heart of The Living Is Easy, as Cleo rises to power by exploiting her sisters, and her sisters' efforts at independence occur through the rejection of Cleo's domination. The homosocial conflict West charts challenges the rosy notion of female friendship as depicted in Their Eyes Were Watching God, by West's 1920s roommate and rival Zora Neale Hurston: in West's fiction, sisterhood is powerful primarily through its ability to render one's sisters powerless.
In Charity's obesity narrative, West exhibits a fascination with what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls "the extraordinary body," a term Garland-Thomson coins to characterize the construction of physically disabled characters in American fiction. In its deviance from the slender, healthy norm, the obese body may be understood in terms similar to that of the disabled: "Bodies that are disabled," Garland-Thomson writes, "can also seem dangerous because they are perceived as out of control. Not only do they violate physical norms, but by looking and acting unpredictable they threaten to disrupt the ritualized behavior upon which social relations turn" (37). Charity's obesity renders her, in Garland-Thomson's words, "unpredictable," violating the codes of middle-class behaviour to which Cleo publicly conforms. In the depiction of...
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