THE NOVELS OF BLACK AMERICAN WOMEN

Consisting of a preface, six chapters and an afterword, this dissertation defines the black experience in America, a world which has its roots in slavery, segregation and discrimination. The novels of black American women are examined as they express life in such a world.; Chapter One, "Color" discusses the significance of skin color and caucasian features in the lives of black females. Considered chronologically, the novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kristin Hunter, Margaret Walker, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Louise Meriwether, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones and Toni Morrison reveal a shift from fair to darker skinned protagonists, and a developing consciousness of the emotional consequences of applying white standards of beauty to black people.; Chapter Two, "The Domestic Worker" treats the significance of black women working in white households. Because of the domestic worker's proximity to whites, she is a useful central consciousness from which to criticize white behavior; moreover black women writers use her to expose intra-racial experience.; Chapter Three, "Religion" shows how the black church generates different attitudes toward religion in the black community.; Chapter Four, "Friendship" describes friendship as it is woven into the action among black girls, West Indian women, and girls of different races.; Chapter Five, "Love and Sexuality" discusses two myths about black women: that they are Mammy Supremes, loving surrogate mothers devoid of sexuality; that they are Semenal Spittoons, sexual conveniences. Both myths reflect an attempt to dehumanize black women by ignoring the constellation of relations that do enter into adult sexuality. The authority of the myths vanishes when this complex of relations is understood and successfully transformed into serious fiction.; Finally, Chapter Six, brings into focus the novels of Toni Morrison who presents the experience of black men as well as women and children, and interprets and transforms such experience into the most significant kind of art--that which delights with each turn of phrase while it instructs.; Black women writers focus on domestic life, on intraracial experience. Although their focus is narrow, because their point of view excludes much white experience, what they describe is original and pertinent, new because their perspective did not and could not appear in novels written by black men or white men and women, and pertinent because their legacy has been left in trust for all people who need to know the consequence of the curtailment of human freedom, who need to know that survival must rest on the capacity to give and inspire love, who need to know too that survival sometimes destroys the ability to give at all. Black women writers tell us that cruelty and suffering are endurable but exact too high a price. Black women writers describe what happens to people under seige. They reveal terrifying weakness and remarkable strengths--often in the same character. Knowing what the human animal is capable of and transforming that knowledge into art is the measure of black American women writers as it is of all writers.