Belmont Humanities Symposium Journal
Abstract
In Toni Morrison's 1993 groundbreaking work Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison argues that Willa Cather's Sapphira and The Slave Girl is an exercise of whiteness, a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious, an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of shame. Morrison's critique is sharp and at times cutting, making visible an Africanist presence alongside Cather's struggle to address the interdependent working of power, race and sexuality in a white woman's battle for coherence. Morrison's argument was critical in 1993 and remains influential, but almost 20 years later, requires revision, taking into account the publication of Cather's letters and an understanding of her complicated relationship to the South as one in which Cather is both an insider and an outsider.
Keywords
Humanities Symposium
Recommended Citation
Gustke, Charmion
(2012)
""From a Heathen Land": The Haunting Disobedience of Jezebel In Willa Cather's Sapphira and The Slave Girl,"
Belmont Humanities Symposium Journal: Vol. 3, Article 11.
Available at:
https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium_journal/vol3/iss1/11