MAKING MEN Making Men Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative t. ,,,Ire, 'hit" b ...' tr BELINDA EDMONDSON Duke University Press Durham and London 1999 © I999 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America e on acid-free paper Typeset in Sabon by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. A portion of chapter 4 originally appeared as "Black Aesthetics, Feminist Aesthetics, and Problems of Oppositional Discourse," Cultural Critique 22 (fall I992): 75-98. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. For my parents, Dorothea and Locksley, with love CONTENTS t. Lb• • hln., 't .hlts Acknowledgments ix Writing the Caribbean: Gender and Literary Authority I PART I Making Men: Writing the Nation I7 I "Race-ing" the Nation: Englishness, Blackness, and the Discourse of Victorian Manhood 9 I 2 Literary Men and the English Canonical Tradition 38 3 Representing the Folk: The Crisis of Literary Authenticity 58 PART II Writing Women: Making the Nation 79 4 Theorizing Caribbean Feminist Aesthetics 8I 5 The Novel of Revolution and the Unrepresentable Black Woman I05 6 Return of the Native: Immigrant Women's Writing and the Narrative of Exile I 39 Notes I69 Bibliography 205 Index 22I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the many people and institutions who have helped to make this book a reality. The ideas for what has now become Making Men are heavily drawn from my doctoral dissertation in the English department at North western University. Accordingly, I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their helpful comments and suggestions: Franc;oise Lionnet, Paul Breslin, and Kenneth Warren. Also, I would like to thank the graduate school at Northwestern and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for giving me research grants which got me started in the right direction. I received two fellowships which allowed me to complete this manu script in both its incarnations, in its first as a dissertation and in its second as a book. The Women's Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, provided me with the predoctoral fellow ship which was invaluable in allowing me the time and space to com plete the manuscript. I would also like to thank the faculty and staff of the English department at Johns Hopkins University for their assistance and camaraderie while I worked on the book as a postdoctoral Mellon Fellow there. Gabriel Miller and Wendell Holbrook, chairs of the En glish department and the program of African! African-American Stud ies at Rutgers-Newark respectively, gave me some much-needed leave from teaching, for which I thank them. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of particular individ uals who helped with the manuscript in various ways: my editor at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker, for his interest in my work and ability to get things moving; my colleague Barbara Foley, whose atten tive reading of my dissertation produced many insightful comments and suggestions which helped me start the revision process; Jean D'Costa, whose thorough reading of the manuscript as well as the historical sources she provided are much appreciated; Antoinette Bur ton, who not only read parts of the manuscript but also sent along all