Remaking black motherhood in Frank J. Webb's The Gaffes and their Friends

(3.) Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood provides an extensive exploration of the dissonances between the standards of white femininity and black female experience.

(4.) Although my analysis focuses on the maternal body as a path to racial self-sufficiency, Webb's novel simultaneously engages the question of black identity on a number of registers. For an excellent analysis of The Garies in conjunction with contemporary self-elevation movements, see Levine; Cooper.

(5.) Robert Reid-Pharr's introduction to the 1997 edition of The Garies skillfully discusses Webb's engagement with sentimentalism, arguing that "Webb was clearly in conversation with a score of authors" whose "sentimentalism and emphasis on the domestic helped shape the ideological structures of the antebellum American writing world" (xviii). My reading of Webb's deployment of sentimental rhetoric draws upon past scholarship illustrating the political uses of the domestic novel, such as the work of Jane Tompkins and Nancy Armstrong. More recently, P. Gabrielle Foreman looks specifically at the subversive elements of black domestic fiction to "suggest that [sentimental] conventions combined With narrative workings that simultaneously criticize them ... constitute black sentimentality as a genre" (331).

(6.) William Wells Brown's 1853 Clotel follows the trials of a family of mulatto female slaves who suffer physical and sexual degradation. Much of the action in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin stems from the flight of the mulatto slave woman Eliza, who seeks to save her child from slavetraders.

(7.) For excellent discussions of the effects of gender stereotypes on narratives of passing, see Hathaway; Smith.

(8.) As Hathaway points out, this tradition extends well beyond the antebellum era. Charles Chesnutt's "The Sheriffs Children" and Langston Hughes's "Father and Son" both focus on a rebellious mulatto son who rises up against his white father (134).

(9.) Here I disagree with M. Giulia Fabi, who argues that "the subordinated and restricted role women play in Webb's fiction is confirmed by his treatment of the theme of passing" and, in particular, through his decision to bestow "this kind of racial mobility only on male characters" (30). Although men are the only characters who actually pass for white, Mrs. Garie also crosses implicit racial boundaries, both through her light complexion and her marriage to a white man. In any case, "racial mobility" seems a dubious asset in Webb's novel, since no character attempting to pass for white achieves any lasting success.

(10.) For more on The Garies as a capitalist manifesto with Waiters as its centerpiece, see Bell 43; Bone 31.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel New York, Oxford UP, 1987.

Bell, Bernard, The Afro-American Novel and its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Bentley, Nancy. "White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction." American Literature 65.3 (1993): 501-21.