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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
Nor did I think of Mary as a "friend"; she was something more -- a force,
a stable familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from
whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face.... at the same
time, Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of
me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement; and I was
torn between resenting her for it and loving her for the nebulous hope
she kept alive. (252-53)
It is no accident that Mary's force becomes most intense after she is erased from the text altogether. For the final three hundred pages of the novel, Mary remains an abstraction, reappearing only in the consciousness of the narrator when he is in danger and in need of motherly guidance.
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To point out the ways Bambara draws on and remakes Ellison's text is not to posit a simple Ellison-as-oppressor, Bambara-as-liberator opposition. Ellison's Invisible Man is a brilliant novel. Bambara's textual intervention and record-correcting is also only one part of a story as multiple and complex as any must be that attempts to construct gendered characters. Indeed, Minnie Ransom, by breaking one stereotype, may herself be constituting or upholding another.5 But in the references and signals that call Invisible Man into the text of The Salt Eaters, Bambara's novel interrogates a pervasive treatment of black women characters, rewriting the tradition, and in so doing, infusing it with a new vitality and angle of vision. Here, she demonstrates a strategy used by many other women writers to critique and correct textual records that perpetuate destructive and essentialized sexual stereotypes.
When Bambara's text draws directly on Ellison's trope of invisibility, the ground shifts enough to break up the terrain of the unsaid, and "invisibility" takes on new significance. A minor character in The Salt Eaters, Porter, explains that
They call the Black man The Invisible Man. And that becomes a double
joke and then a double cross then a triple funny all around. Our natures
are unknowable, unseeable to them. They haven't got the eyes for us.
Course, when we look at us with their eyes, we disappear. (158-59)
The question, in Bambara's terms, becomes one of who hasn't got the eyes for whom? 7he Salt Eaters consistently raises the possibility that those "unknowable, unseeable" natures of which Porter speaks are not those of all African Americans, but inscribed in the terms of Ellison's text, those of black women, rendered invisible under a system of essentially androcentric seeing.
The author would like to thank J. Lee Greene for extensive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Notes
1. Critics have noted similarities in the two novels. Gloria Hull, for example, argues that 7he Salt Eaters -accomplishes even better for the 1980s what... Invisible Man [did] for the 1950s" (124). In addition, Eleanor Traylor suggests that Bambara was quite familiar with Invisible Man, and points out in great detail her debt to Ellison in her uses of the jazz mode in The Salt Eaters.
