Embodying Beauty by Pereira Malin;

Author:Pereira, Malin; [Pereira, Malin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Maud Martha's anthropomorphizing of the mouse is wholly in domestic terms. Her positive regard for the domestic causes her to release the mouse, saying, “‘Go home to your children’ … ‘To your wife or husband’” (212). Maud Martha then returns to her own domestic tasks with “a new cleanness in her” (212).

Brooks' positive rendering of domesticity starkly contrasts with that of Wright, whose main character, Bigger, thinks, “He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel in fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair” (13).

Brooks' “re-Wright” marks her delineation of new, uncharted aesthetic space. While Wright uses the opening domestic scene in Native Son as an entry to the ‘larger’ socio-political issues at the center of his “protest” novel, Brooks places her domestic mouse scene at the very center of Maud Martha (Chapter 17 in 34 chapters). The home, and daily life, are her artistic subject matter.

From within this domestic frame Brooks re-evaluates beauty. To return to Shaw's characterization of Maud Martha as a “war” against beauty, I find it more accurate to see the theme of beauty in Maud Martha as Brooks' negotiation of hegemonic aesthetic standards of physical and literary or artistic beauty, using her character Maud Martha, and her positive creation of an alternative aesthetic space in the domestic. As Barbara Christian has argued, Maud Martha manifests “Brooks” own philosophy about the relationship between life and aesthetics” (“Nuance and the Novella” 247). Using Maud Martha as a figure of negotiation, Brooks presents scenes of beauty and ugliness which delineate the values of the “universal” Eurocentric aesthetic, counterpointed by scenes of domestic, everyday beauty which reevaluate that aesthetic.

This reading resists using Maud Martha as simply an autobiographical extension of the author's own aesthetic beliefs.4 Rather than a spokeswoman, Maud Martha, like Hurston's Janie and H.D.'s Helen, acts as a pawn in an aesthetic argument. Through vignettes which reveal the character Maud Martha's self-denying acceptance of the Universalist aesthetic and the unremarked daily beauty, Brooks inscribes the text's rewriting of universalism in favor of domestic detail. Brooks' own descriptions of the composition of Maud Martha support this argument. As D.H. Melham reveals, Brooks' response to her editor's early critiques indicated “Helen had been the protagonist… [but] the more emotional Evelina (later Maud Martha) seemed to upstage her in the plot” (81). Helen, alluding to Helen of Troy, beauty herself (as H.D. called her), was, according to Brooks, “chiefly ‘made up’” (Report 191). Helen acts in the text as a figure of “universal” female beauty and Universalist aesthetics; Maud Martha's own textual emergence thus enacts an aesthetic repositioning. As Barbara Christian notes, the focus in Maud Martha on an unheroic girl “is in itself a challenge to a venerated ‘universal’ idea” (“Nuance and the Novella” 247). Whereas nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American texts had

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.