A someone like the dreamer: Relationship, community and consciousness in 20th century African American women's novels

"A Someone Like the Dreamer: Relationship, Community and Consciousness in 20th Century African American Women's Novels" is, in a broad sense, an inquiry into the changing nature of freedom---as ideal, as discourse and as experience---in African American history, culture and literature. More specifically, it is an exploration of 20th century African American women novelists' (re)vision of freedom, their departure from white, Western, male ideals of freedom as autonomy and individuality and their continuing vision of freedom as more complex than the simple absence of subjugation. In the novels included in this study, freedom emerges as a relational experience, realized within and through the dynamic spaces created by the matrix of relationship, community and consciousness.;The texts for this project are Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God in the Modern section and Toni Morrison's Sula and Alice Walker's The Color Purple in the Contemporary section. In reading these novels, I attempt to locate and examine their embedded, yet revelatory responses, not only to the broader question of freedom, but to a more specific one: what does it mean to be black, to be a woman and to be free? These novels lay bare the particular nature of black women's experience of oppression---whether material, social, cultural or psychological in nature---and their ceaseless quest to attain their own vision of freedom, a relational freedom.;I examine these authors and their work within the context of certain critical discourses in social, cultural and literary history; I read Larsen and Hurston within the context of American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance and Morrison and Walker within the context of the Civil Rights and Women's Rights Movements. My readings focus on the manner in which the novelists and their novels are influenced by and in dialogue with these discourses and with ideologies of race, class, gender and identity. Ultimately, through close textual readings, I hope to illuminate the manner in which Larsen, Hurston, Morrison and Walker engage and explore the extraordinary matrix of relationship, community and consciousness in black women's quests for a relational freedom.