Content provided in partnership with
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
Enter Mary Rambo, a comfortingly nonsexual big dark woman," who offers the narrator help when she sees him stagger and faint on a sidewalk in Harlem. Taking charge, she directs the crowd to "stand back and let the man breathe." Once the narrator is back on his feet, Mary convinces him to come home with her ("you weak and caint hardly walk ... and you look what's more like you hungry"). Mary, who apparently has time on her hands, pleads, "let me do something for you" (246). A nearby man chimes in like a Greek chorus, "You in good hands, daddy. Miss Mary always helping somebody" (247). My point here is not to diminish the significance of black women's traditional importance to their communities as networkers and caregivers, but to look at how this particular stereotype functions to erase the nonessential diversity of black women by slotting them into two extreme and essentialist characterizations. Mary Rambo joins a long line of textual representations of women as "helpers," "caretakers," and "nurturers," women who occupy the moral high ground of the madonna/whore duality.
- More Articles of Interest
- Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - Critical...
- "A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in...
- The critical response to Ralph Ellison. - book review
- Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. - Review - book reviews
- Invisible desires: Homoerotic racism and its homophobic critique in Ralph...
Although Mary is locked into her representation as a self-effacing, maternal caretaker, Ellison's text has a momentary rupture in which Mary emerges demonstrating considerable sagacity and wit. In this section, Mary delivers a riddling passage to the narrator as he is readying himself to leave her for the last time. He listens, but fails to understand fully when Mary tells him,
And you have to take care of yourself, son. Don't let this Harlem git you.
I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean?
Don't git corrupted. (249)
This uncharacteristically wise and direct discourse can be traced to an earlier version of the "Mary Rambo" section of Invisible Man, a version Ellison excised because of "space constraints." In this version Mary figures as a fully described, spunky, physically strong and self-reliant healer. A paid employee at the Liberty Paints hospital, she is also connected through her 104-year-old mother to the traditional healing arts of rootwork and conjure. This Mary was quite nearly buried until 1963 when Herbert Hill's collection, Soon, One Morning, appeared, including the excised chapter from Invisible Man.
Introducing the segment, Ellison explains that this longer narrative
marked an attempt to get the hero ... out of the hospital into the world of
Harlem. It was Mary's world, the world of the urbanized (or partially
urbanized) Negro folk, and I found it quite pleasurable to discover,
during those expansive days of composition before the necessities of
publication became a reality, that it was Mary, a woman of the folk, who
helped release the hero from the machine. ("Out" 243)
Ellison adds that he is "pleased to see this version in print" because Mary "deserved more space in the novel and would, I think, have made it a better book" ("Out" 243).
In this segment, titled "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar," the action begins after an explosion (and not coincidentally, after the narrator has aroused suspicion of being a union sympathizer) at the Liberty Paints factory. The narrator has been held inside a glass box, figuring much like a jail or coffin, for extended electric-shock treatments designed to "cure" him into forgetting his blackness. Mary appears to the narrator while he is still strapped inside the box. Weak from lack of food, disoriented, and exhausted, the narrator notices her grinning down at him. The differences in physical description between this Mary and Invisible Man's shapeless, sexless, "big dark woman" are striking:
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Business
- Academy of Marketing Science Review
- Accounting Historians Journal, The
- Accounting History
- AgExporter
- Agricultural Research
- Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
- Air Force Comptroller
- Air Safety Week
- Airline Industry Information
- American Demographics
- American Journal of Potato Research
- Architectural Review, The
- Asian Economic News
- Entrepreneur