GEORGE STADE
267
book nor I would have peen written." Oelie, Nettie, and Shug all pay
their tribute to the Spirit. "God is everything, say Shug.")
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
is womanist in this sense.
So is
Jane Eyre.
So are Virginia Woolrs
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the
Lighthouse.
But the long high noon of womanist fiction extended over
the two middle quarters of nineteenth-century America. During that
period, liberal ministers and Northeastern middle class women joined
forces to beget the sentimental firstborn of American mass culture.
Such is the argument of Ann
Douglas'~
The Feminization of American
Culture,
one of the few truly
i~portapt
recent studies of American
literature and society. As Misll Douglas shows, middlebrow ladies'
magazines such as
Godey's, Graham's,
and
Peterson's,
far outsold those
for high-brows or mel). During the 1850s, anyone of the more
popular womanist novels outsold all of the works of Hawthorne,
Melville, Thoreau, and Whitmqp published during the whole
decade. As one male competitor, his mouth pursed with sour grapes,
complained,
"It
is the women who read.
It
is the women who are the
tribunal of any question
a~ide
frpm politics or business.
It
is the
women who give or
wi~hhold
a literary reputation. It is the women
who regulate the style of living: . . . It is the women who exercise
the ultimate control over tht! press ."
The kind of writin& that brought on this diatribe, in Miss
Douglas' words, was frequently informed by "a massive hatred of the
male world," by
"narcissi~tic
rage," by a need to demonstrate that
"any
woman is better than
any
man." The nonclerical male
characters, by and large, are "either awkward brutes, stumbling
amid female subtleties, or wistful would-be transvestites" - which is
what Alice Walker's Harpo and Mr.
turn out to be. Popular
as they were, the domestic-sentimental novels of the mid-century are
no longer read outside of the classroom with one exception.
I
That
exception is
Uncle Tom's Cabin
which according to Harriet Beecher
Stowe, "God wrote," and which is the spiritual progenitor of
The
Color Purple,
not because of the race issue, the emotional hot spot of
neither novel, qllt because of their shared womanism.
.
Harriet Beecher Stowe objected to slavery for a number of goqd
reasons- bec<!use it was unjust, because it was
un-Christ[~n',
and
above all, because it separated women from their children',
as
~e' a~e
L Womanist critics have launched an attempt to revive interest in Susan Warner
and
Sarah Orne Jewett.
