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The named and the nameless: Morrison's 124 and Naylor's "the other place" as semiotic chorae
African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Elizabeth T. Hayes
Identity formation necessitates an individual's creating a space for the self to occupy, or "defining a metaphorical space to speak from," in critic Margot Anne Kelley's words (xiii). For African American women, particularly those who, as slaves, had been denied agency in any physical or metaphorical space, including the space of their own bodies, individuation was therefore often difficult to achieve. Kelley speculates that "a persistent awareness of th[e] need to carve a niche, to make a space, may be one of the reasons that the novels of [...] black American women [...] routinely offer highly particular accounts of space--be they architectural spaces, geographical spaces, psychic spaces, or communal spaces" (xiii). In fact, the houses in African American women's literature are often palimpsests of all four kinds of space--architectural, geographic, psychic, and communal--and thus they are multilayered signifiers.
Commenting on the importance of house tropes to American literature, Chandler notes that "houses are [...] the stage on which the dramas of sexual politics and class warfare are played out" (6). For black women, of course, racial politics are also played out in and through houses. African American literature is replete with examples. In the autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, for instance, Jacobs escapes from her sexually predatory slaveowner by hiding for seven years in an attic crawl-space in her grandmother's house. The Youngers in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun aspire to live in a house of their own with a yard and a garden even if they have to desegregate a "white" neighborhood to do so. Morrison's The Bluest Eye contrasts the bleak storefront room in which the Breedloves live with at least five other domiciles, among them the run-down old house that the MacTeers work so hard and so proudly to own, the comfortable, happy suburban home with the white picket fence of the "Dick and Jane" basal readers, and the wealthy Fischer family's posh mansion where Pauline Breedlove finds fulfillment as a domestic. Naylor's Bailey's Cafe and Morrison's Paradise focus on controversial "women's" houses on the margins of an African American community: Eve's boardinghouse--or whorehouse--in Bailey's Cafe and the old convent occupied by "outcast" women a few miles from Ruby, Oklahoma, in Paradise. In these and many other American literary texts, "a house stands at stage center as a unifying symbolic structure that represents and defines the relationships of the central characters to one another, to themselves, and to the world" (Chandler 3).
124 Bluestone Road, in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and "the other place," in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, provide precisely this kind of unifying symbolic structure. Though imbued with the mystery of the supernatural, the houses themselves are ordinary buildings, devoid of dungeons, turrets, secret staircases, or hidden rooms. The geography of these novels is not gothic but magical realist. As magic realist houses, 124 and the other place literally embody the otherworldly women who inhabit them, thus erasing the boundaries between the supernormal and the normal. These houses represent the African American feminine Other by re-presenting it, by giving textual (and architectural) voice to its silences, its ways of knowing and being, and its power. The space of women's discourse, including liminal or otherworldly discourse, is figured as domestic space in these novels.
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