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He speaks for whom?: inscription and reinscription of women in 'Invisible Man' and 'The Salt Eaters.' - Varieties of Ethnic Criticism
MELUS, Summer, 1993 by Ann Folwell Stanford
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What happens to "the second sex" in a novel as powerful as Ellison's Invisible Man where the trope of invisibility functions as a critique of racist American society? When the text itself perpetuates the invisibility it seeks to undo, it seems inevitable that it will invite response and revision. In Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters we can discern an argument, not with Ellison's manifest text of invisibility and "the blackness of blackness," but with the subtext of gender erasure.
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African American feminist critics have, especially in the last fifteen or twenty years, articulated the problematic of double invisibility, the double jeopardy that results from being both black and female. They have sought to add gender to DuBois's well known analysis of the sense of double -- consciousness" with which many African Americans live (3). Bell Hooks claims that "no other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women" (7). It is not simply that race, gender and class compound oppression arithmetically, to cite Valerie Smith (who borrows from Barbara Smith), but that "issues of class and race alter one's experience of gender, just as gender alters one's experience of class and race" ("Loopholes" 225). Much work in black feminist theory and criticism has taken as its subject the construction and/or erasure of African American women, and especially how the combined categories of race, class, and gender intensify and illuminate in important ways both reading and writing, believing "that the meaning of blackness in this country shapes profoundly the experience of gender, just as the conditions of womanhood affect ineluctably the experience of race" (Smith, "Black Feminist Theory" 47).
Many novels written by black women since the publication of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man have (among other things) filled in gaps or given voice to the silences that have kept black women invisible. Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters is one such novel. Published in 1980, twenty-eight years after Ellison's Invisible Man, after the turbulent sixties and some gains had been made by the Civil Rights Movement, The Salt Eaters moves beyond its own created world, engaging other texts like Invisible Man in a dialogic relationship. Henry Louis Gates explains the phenomenon thus:
Literary works are in dialogue not because of some mystical collective
unconscious determined by the biology of race or gender, but because
writers read other writers and ground their representations of experience
in models of language provided largely by other writers to whom
they feel akin. (7)
Gates is speaking here of the construction of a tradition of black women writers, but this phenomenon/strategy is similar even when the writers do not, perhaps, feel such kinship.
Invisible Man itself is peopled with the discourse of Anglo-American male writers from Jefferson and Whitman to Faulkner and Hemingway, providing a "twentieth-century Western gloss in the use of Freudian, Marxist, and existentialist notions of self" (Byerman 11). Ellison brings the language, imagery, and symbols of these writers and works into his text, and by placing them in an entirely new context, he "changes the joke and slips the yoke," or rather reverses, revises, or augments the writing and thinking of these men in ways that Russian Formalists would have called "defamiliarization." Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay, "Art as Technique," explains:
After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object
is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it -- hence we
cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the
automatism of perception in several ways. (13)
If the object in question happens to be another work of art, a literary text, for example -- a Whitman poem or the Declaration of Independence -- the estrangement" or defamiliarization occurs when that work is pulled into an unfamiliar context, such as a novel about the impossibility of freedom and "the body electric" for a man who is socially and culturally invisible. The shifted discursive ground makes possible fresh patterns of thought and action, and (among other things) provides readers with a different lens through which to read well-known cultural documents. In much the same way, The Salt Eaters takes on Invisible Man.
One of the primary projects of black women's writing has been, according to Deborah McDowell, "a revisionist mission aimed at substituting reality for stereotype" (284) and correcting a record of invisibility. This project is not unlike Ellison's dialogue with and revision of Anglo-American white writers, but for African American women, it necessarily takes into account and foregrounds gender. In addition, Mary Helen Washington says that it is a move that "takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written" (xxi). For Bambara, that project has included a specific dialogue with Ralph Ellison's text, a move that, to borrow from Mae Henderson speaking about black women writers in general, is "a deliberate intervention...into the canonic tradition of sacred/literary texts- (124).
