Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960 by Mary Helen WashingtonReview by: Marcellus BlountLegacy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1988), pp. 56-57Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679019 .

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56 LEGACY

Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960 By Mary Helen Washington Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1987 447 pp. $7.95

Reviewed by Marcellus Blount, Columbia University

Afro-Americanist and feminist readers of this volume will be keenly aware of the im

portance of the anthology as a mode of cultural representation. As black and women artists have turned to the anthol

ogy as a space of refuge and shared iden

tity, their critics have found sustenance and

continuity in the community of texts which the anthology makes possible. Invented Lives should remind us all that while we have yet to struggle free of the social and

political forces that limit and constrict the

creativity of black and women artists, their works can be bound together in ways that resist and subvert the notions that these ar tists were ever marginal. Mary Helen

Washington persuades us that these works have always been central to the experi ence of women and Afro-Americans, and in recent years she has helped them to reach the audiences which they deserve.

In Invented Lives, Washington com

presses historical time and artistic genre into a single moment of black female cre

ativity. In ways that achieve both aesthetic

immediacy and historical authority, she melds excerpts of novels and short stories with her own critical analysis, at once en

riching the texture of the fiction and height ening the clarity of the criticism. By gather ing disparate works in order to achieve a new creative unity, she posits in this new

anthology the shared aesthetics of black feminist art and scholarship as a means of

merging the voices of black women, how ever separated they may be by history and

profession. The results of her ambitions are rich and rewarding. Invented Lives will be even more important, I suspect, than her two previous anthologies, Black-Eyed Su sans (1975) and Midnight Birds (1980). Washington's volume encompasses, in

chronological order, the works of 10 black

women writers: Harriet Jacobs, Frances El len Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Fannie Barrier Williams, Marita O. Bon

ner, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Not surprisingly, the differences in

style, theme, and point of view among these writers are considerable. In most

cases, Washington's choice of selections is

compelling: she focuses on what might be called "scenes of female instruction" in which these female protagonists achieve a new sense of purpose, identity, and voice. These selections allow readers to revel in the rich complexities of female experience, even while we are compelled to recall the

recurring patterns of the black female pro tagonist's struggle for selfhood in the face of racism and sexism. While some of these

protagonists (and writers) have suffered more than others from the effects of white and male ignorance and hostility, they all

attempt to devise distinctive strategies for

resisting their oppression. Whereas black male protagonists and writers have been obsessed with the solitary battle with white

society, their female counterparts have cel ebrated the possibilities of family and cul ture as ways of reclaiming and sustaining the self. In general, these black women

emphasize the search for community rather than the heroic quests of black men

for individuality and solitude. As Washing ton puts it, "Women talk to other women in this tradition, and their friendships with other women?mothers, sisters, grand

mothers, friends, lovers?are vital to their

growth and well-being" (xxi). For these fe male protagonists and women writers, inti

macy becomes both the means and the end of black creativity.

In addition to her engaging readings of the selected authors and her subtle treat

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Reviews 57

ment of issues of race and gender within and against traditional models of the Afro American experience, Washington man

ages to situate these disparate works in the context of their aesthetic and political re

ception. By analyzing their negative re views and comparing them to the more substantial treatment which black men re ceive for their representations of black women in American and Afro-American

literary and popular culture, Washington argues rather successfully that the forces of sexism have been more discouraging than those of racism. Even at the risk of over

stating her case, she devotes most of her critical attention to these issues of the ex clusion and marginalization of the black fe male canon within constructions of the Af ro-American literary tradition.

Quite understandably, some of her read ers may wish that she had been more pre cise in her treatment of textual matters.

Others may long for more detail in her dis cussions of the effect of these reclaimed works on our sense of which modes of reading are most appropriate for black women writers. While Washington refuses to force her selected writers into the "little spaces men have alloted women" (xxvii) and her attempts to reconstruct a new black female canon are richly suggestive, she seems unwilling (at least in this work) to tackle the most difficult and perplexing issues of her endeavor. What spaces will black male writers inhabit in this newly re vised Afro-American tradition? Where do these black female writers belong in the emerging (largely white) feminist canon? These questions may never be answered

conclusively, yet I have the sneaking suspi cion that Washington may well have re served consideration of these matters for her future anthologies.

Reconstructing Womanhood:

The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist By Hazel V. Carby New York: Oxford University Press, 1987 223 pp. $19.95

Reviewed by Claudia Tate, Howard University

Reconstructing Womanhood is a pro vocative and groundbreaking study that

historically reconstructs the years spanning the last decade of the nineteenth and the

early years of the twentieth centuries. Scholars of Afro-American culture have

traditionally characterized this period as a

dialogue between two black ideologues Booker T. Washington and William E.B. DuBois, and most historical and literary studies of it foreground their debate be tween the conciliatory postponement and immediate militant assertion of black politi cal rights, on the one hand, and industrial versus academic education for black peo ple, on the other. However, Carby re-ex

amines this period by focusing on the polit ical activism of six very outspoken black

women (Frances Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Sarah J. Early, and Hallie Quinn Brown) who, in the words of Har per, asserted that they stood uon the thres hold of woman's era" (3). Carby, then, does not foreground the ways in which black men, like Du Bois and Washington, understood race as the determinant of their position in a patriarchal society. By relying on historical materialism, she literally re constructs this period from the perspective of these black women's political agendas in order to demonstrate how they established

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