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Name: Heather Colley

Student ID: 200019554
Programme: MLitt Modern and Contemporary
Literature
Module Code: EN5100
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Moore, Geneva C. Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature:
From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison. Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South
Carolina Press, 2017.
 In Geneva Cobb Moore’s Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s
Literature: From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison, Moore reads across a remarkable, nearly
three-hundred-year span of manifestations of maternity throughout the works of Phillis
Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Paule
Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Is it possible to link literary examples from such a
wide span of periods and perspectives within African American history through a somewhat
narrow thematic lens of maternity, and can we do so in a way beyond tenuous close-readings and
the existing feminist scholarship with which Wheatley frequently concurs or debates with?
Moore succeeds at this mammoth task by underscoring the intricate historical, political,
and intertextual residues that bridge these writers together through an evenly dispersed
foundation of seminal thinkers, as she adopts Lacan and Foucault’s approaches of racial and
gendered “taxonomies,” Du Bois’ writings on the emerging black aristocracy, racial
regeneration, and double consciousness, Kant’s concepts of free and independent beauty,
Adorno’s “after-image” effects of cultural memory, and Freud’s internalizations of parental
dependencies (to only list some of Moore’s foundational theoretical premises which might attract
an undergraduate or early doctoral researcher in search of classic sociological and philosophical
engagements with American racial history). The result of Moore’s grounding in this broad range
of seminal theory is a continuum with a fundamental tenet that is multi-disciplinarian: across a
complicated and discursive history, and throughout rapidly changing social and economic
circumstances, the African American experience is a perpetual reverberation of the hegemonic
dichotomy of slavery and masterdom, a cyclical dichotomy that is masked in the changing
facades of modernity. This argument underscores the book’s sociological orientations around
history, politics, and economics, and whilst the groundwork of a perpetual but shape-shifting
ethics of African-American subjugation is not altogether new (see, for instance, Michelle
Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness), Moore’s
originality is rooted in her effective deployment of literary text as tangible evocations of African-
American history, and particularly the oft-overlooked possibilities of feminine agency that stem
from maternal power dynamics amongst the intersections of white-centric and patriarchal
structures.1
The wide chronological scope of Moore’s work informs the layout of this review. One of
the book’s strengths is the way in which the density of a multi-generational history is gradually
but seamlessly compounded. Like the very history that foregrounds each literary reading, nothing
happens in a vacuum, and this is important to Moore’s deep sense of continuity. That being said,
significant attention should be paid chapters 4 and 7, because they alone occupy half of the book,
and because they deal with complete literary oeuvres: those of Larsen, Faucet, and Hurston, and
Toni Morrison’s full body of work, respectively.       
However, it is through the gradual augmentation of historical circumstance, and its
surrounding literary subversions of hegemonic racial politics, that Moore succeeds in the
complexity and totality of her later chapters. She starts at the true beginning, and argues that
Phillis Wheatley was the first “African American female writer to combine the domestic politics
of maternal and feminist ethics on a prominent level,” an argument that is polemical amidst
scholarly analyses of Wheatley that disestablish her as a voice of powerful black subjectivity
(11). Moore supports her interpretation of Wheatley as a harbinger of African American
1
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012).
literature through analyses of Wheatley’s maternal metaphors of regeneration and rebirth, which
illustrate geneses within commodified black bodies. Moore argues that the blackness of the slave
body in America was affiliated with racialized imaginations of Africa as dark, wild, and barbaric,
a conception that is complicated and subverted through Wheatley’s focus on the black female
body as a maternal yet powerful locale with the capacity not only to birth children on biological
terms, but also to rebirth oneself. Wheatley’s subversions of the commodified and sexed bodies
of black women, especially after aggressive abductions and transcontinental enslavement, is
particularly critical to the book’s broad historical and geographical landscape because, as Moore
notes, Wheatley stood “on the threshold of a defining moment in history,” and Moore adeptly
shows how Wheatley critiqued the hegemonies of her day, through the use of a “double voiced”
criticism, allusions to Greek and Roman maternal Goddesses, and the artistic skill of Africa’s
preliterate oral tradition.
In Chapters two and three, Moore moves to the nineteenth century with writers Harriet
Jacobs and Charlotte Forten Grimké. Moore reads Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
through neuroses and theories of madness, and argues that high-level anxieties, compulsions, and
obsessions realize themselves in Jacobs’ relationship with Dr. Flint, and the psyche itself thusly
becomes a psychological “manifestation of plantation neuroses” (40). Moore draws on
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and devotes substantial analysis to a Freudian lens of
trauma and psychological torture. While Moore acknowledges feminist rejection of Freudian
theory generally, her strong deference to neurotic, compulsive, and unconscious explanations of
certain phenomena, including sporadic oscillations between the enslaved body and the love
interest, seem contradictory to her later rejection of Freudian interpretations of father-daughter
dependencies in Larsen’s work in chapter four. Because of this attention to Freudian paternalism
in Jacobs’ diaries, Jacobs’ maternal interiorities are clarified only later on, through Moore’s
reading of social life as a theatre, and Jacobs’ role-playing to “thwart the paternal law” of
exploitable female bodies (47). This latter reading of plantation economy histrionics is perhaps
more conducive to the book’s project of analyzing maternal sources of power, particularly
compared to Moore’s Freudian interpretation, and may have benefited from a brief overview of
Erving Goffman’s sociological study of role-playing as a social tool, or “dramaturgy,”
particularly because this chapter leans toward a socially scientific praxis through Foucault, and
because the book’s wide methodological scope invites audiences from sociological disciplines.2
Nonetheless Moore’s analysis of Jacobs leads organically into that of Grimké, the latter of which
involves Grimké’s negotiations between Southern antebellum confinements of Victorian
motherhood, and the marginalization of black Victorian mothers who are as yet denied full
personhood within upper-class life. Moore affectively argues that Grimké’s unique perspectives
into overlapping spheres of socioeconomic elitism and racial marginality offer important
subversions of Victorian motherhood tropes, and this chapter serves as a sensical bridge between
Wheatley, Jacobs, and the early 20th century writers to whom Moore devotes ample space.
Chapter four is representative of Moore’s strengths throughout the book globally, and is
one of her high points. Moore is remarkably thorough in her articulations of the historical
zeitgeist and socioeconomic conditions of the Harlem Renaissance, which she uses as the
backdrop of her argument that Fauset, Larsen, and Hurston overcame four specific obstacles as
they defined a black feminine aesthetic against the pre-aesthetics of slavery and the antiblack
aesthetic of Jim Crow America. These authors’ “four challenges of a black aesthetic program”
lose a bit of their specificity in Moore’s scope – which ranges from the commodified body in the
2
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Penguin, 1990).
context of Phillis Wheatley’s experience, to the core principals of both aesthetic beauty and the
emerging “New Negro” from Du Bois, Joel Kovel, Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, Kant, and
Adorno (96). This all-encompassing context might be particularly helpful to an undergraduate
with a fresh but particular interest in the Harlem Renaissance well beyond its literature, whereas
a scholar of African American literary studies might find the chapter’s latter, more focused
close-readings more pressing. Similarly, a scholarly audience might note that Moore’s close-
readings in this chapter adopt the broad-scale pattern of her introductory material: rather than
discussing specific maternal metaphors line-by-line, Moore argues that the “maternal-acting” in
Fauset’s work, for instance, represents a feminist antidote to “the politics of Jim Crow exclusion
and despair” (102). In so doing, Moore avoids compact, semiotic close readings in favor of the
wider social implications of literary patterns, an approach that might perhaps serve a historical
interest differently than a purely literary one.
The strength of this chapter is also rooted in Moore’s polemical identification and
correction of earlier arguments that she finds misguided or reductive. Analytical flaws arise
when maternal tropes of regeneration are overlooked, or seen as perfunctory, and there are
copious examples of Moore’s rectification of these oversights. For instance, Moore writes that
Robert Bones’ attack on Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree overlooks the feminist discourse
surrounding characters’ autonomous involvement in modern economic life; similarly, Moore
inverts Claudia Tate’s Freudian reading of Larsen’s Quicksand to instead orient the novel around
how the absent mother figure reflects Jim Crow politics of homelessness and ancestry
(130). Through these identifications of scholarly flaws, Moore effectively articulates her broader
theme of racial segregation’s powerful hegemony: because of sexual and racial stratifications
that are deeply etched into the fabric of American life, black women’s maternity can work in
subtle and implicit ways which are often overlooked by the existing scholarship. Moore’s
identification of these tropes of motherhood, against a powerful and dehumanizing hegemony,
render her polemics more powerful because they not only open a scholarly gap through which to
offer progressive readings, but also illustrate the pervasiveness of patriarchal and racial
hegemony within the existing body of scholarship itself.
Despite the book’s division into two parts – the first of which captures slavery,
emancipation, Jim Crow, and 20th century modernism, and the second of which focuses on an
emerging postmodern subjectivity amidst a new political landscape – Moore evades strict
historical compartmentalization. Chapters five and six both stress the continuum of tropes that
extend from as far back as Wheatley’s seventeenth century poetry, into post-civil rights
landscapes. Chapter five, however, is an outlier in that it focuses on diasporic identity formation
within bicultural communities of Caribbean and West Indian descent, through readings of Paule
Marshall’s oeuvre. Despite the sudden discursive effect of Moore’s deviation into theorizing the
African Diaspora, her focus on Marshall’s maternal imprinting through “African tales, myths,
and rituals,” as well her reading of mothers as “women warriors” are reminiscent of Wheatley’s
mythic appeals to Greco-Roman goddesses, and Moore is particularly engaging in her
interpretation of the violent imperial history of the Barbados as an allegorical vehicle for
personal tragedy in Chosen Place, Timeless People (172). Moore’s engagement with Alice
Walker in chapter six argues that Walker appropriates psychoanalytic theory to probe and
cement subjectivities that are dually feminine and masculine, and this essence of the “phallic
maternal” is contextualized as a mechanism for identity and autonomy amidst wide-scale
dehumanization throughout civil-rights movement efforts (197).
 Moore’s final chapter, titled “Bodily Evidence: Toni Morrison’s Demonic Parody of
Race and Slavery,” occupies nearly one third of the book, due to Moore’s understanding of
Morrison as the encompassing figure who subsumes “all the history covered by these writers”
(228). This approach to Morrison’s universality rests on the foundation of the preceding
chapters: the hegemony of the social and political structures of American racial dynamics.
However, Moore concludes her study with an engaging approach to hegemony that has not yet
been utilized and which affords her ending a unique gravity. The core of Morrison’s work,
Moore argues, depends on the use of parody as a tool to illuminate and dismantle the deficiencies
of a pre-existing “master discourse” (229). As in the previous chapters, Moore’s argument gains
initial traction by contradicting extant scholarship, in this case Frederic Jameson’s distinction
between pastiche and parody, and Moore differentiates herself when she introduces “demonic
parody” in Morrison’s Beloved. Demonic parody, Moore argues, has the capacity to illustrate the
hellish, “apocalyptic” world of racial segregation (231). The depth and historical scope of
Morrison’s parody is reflected in the scale of Moore’s chapter, which locates Morrison’s
demonic subversions of the gamut of American history and politics, from the origins of its
democracy, to the three-fifths compromise, to the Southern plantation economy, to the black
ghettos of New York and Chicago, and to perpetual conflicts between African American identity
and the national body politic. In one of Moore’s strongest chapters, the most engaging analyses
are concerned with the works in which the maternal tropes heretofore discussed – the drive to
nurture and protect, the power to recreate and reproduce, the ability to subvert racialized
expectations through intergenerational maternal wisdom – are absent. In Jazz and Love, Moore
argues, the absences of “loving maternal dyads” are the premise of Morrison’s more oblique and
allusive parody. In Love, for instance, Christine’s series of abortions is both a mockery of faulty
contraception and a refusal to fall into a maternal cycle. This, Moore argues, symbolizes a dual
“individual and cultural breakdown,” and it is through this effective turn of argument – from the
presence of a maternal trope to the rejection of one – that Moore concludes on a powerful note
that opens new questions of a postmodern world in which the powers of motherhood delineated
here might barely be conceivable amidst morally bankrupt systems of love and sexuality (284.
   In the universe of Moore’s maternal metaphors, maternity and femininity are merely
catalysts through which to read recurring themes that arise even as history progresses across
hundreds of years of black women’s’ literature: from the regenerative power of the sexed and
commodified black female body-in-crisis, to personal choices surrounding either conformity or
subversion of maternal ideals, to motherlessness and rootlessness as representative of a wider
crisis of belonging or lack thereof, to manifestations of maternal beauty and aesthetics, Moore
articulates motherhood in a multifold web of complexity and scope to match the ambition of her
historical framework, and moves – successfully and effectively – well beyond the
circumscriptions of strict textual analyses in the process.    
 References

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New
York: The New Press, 2012.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.

Moore, Geneva C. Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature:

From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison. Columbia, South Carolina: The University of South
Carolina Press, 2017.