Passing into the present by Sinead Moynihan

Author:Sinead Moynihan [Moynihan, Sinead]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, American, General, Social Science, Gender Studies, Lgbtq, Minority Studies
ISBN: 9781847797704
Google: j2W5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2013-07-19T04:10:28+00:00

‘Passing’ from childhood to adulthood

Like the protagonist of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, who is first educated at home and subsequently attends public school, Birdie is alternately home-schooled by her mother and educated at a mainstream school. However, unlike in Johnson’s novella, in which the shift from home to public school precipitates a confrontation with his racial identity and his concomitant ‘otherness’, Birdie and Cole are othered even in their home-school environment. Their mother specialises in teaching ‘special children’ who are ‘dyslexic, retarded, or simply bad-natured’ (Caucasia, p. 137). A slippage is thus introduced between the ‘otherness’ of her regular pupils and that of her own children. As Birdie observes, ‘When my mother wasn’t teaching those disturbed and delayed children, she taught me’ (p. 137). Sandy’s own mother, who disapproves of the girls’ being home-schooled, tells Sandy that she is ‘wonderful with those mongoloids’ but ‘normal children are simply not [her] specialty’ (p. 105). The term ‘mongoloid’ in this case functions as a pejorative description of a person with learning difficulties. However, ‘Mongoloid’, with a capital ‘m’, also bears racial connotations. Specifically, it recalls Deck Lee’s view of his own marriage as an experiment in miscegenation. A photo of his wedding day marks a page in his encyclopaedia delineating ‘the three racial phenotypes of the world – Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid’ (p. 30). The labels ‘Mongoloid’ – as neither ‘Negroid’ nor ‘Caucasoid’, like Cole and Birdie – and ‘mongoloid’ thus serve to reinforce the association between Sandra’s overlapping roles as teacher and mother to children who are ‘different.’

Ironically, given what occurs in the basement of their Boston home, Sandra favours home-schooling her children ‘to keep [them] safe from the racism and violence of the world’ (p. 26). Although the girls are ‘othered’ even through their home-schooling, the school functions as the space in which they are initiated into their racial difference. However, unlike the narrator of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, who learns of his mixedness when he is designated as ‘nonwhite’ or ‘other’ by a schoolteacher, white-looking Birdie attends an all-black school and as such, her fellow students ask: ‘What you doin’ in this school? You white?’ (p. 43).20 In a scene reminiscent of William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Birdie is cornered in the school toilets by a girl who threatens to cut her hair. In Clotel the mixed race heroine is ordered to cut off her long hair by her mistress, Mrs. French, who is jealous of her beauty.21 Because ‘the glossy ringlets of her raven hair’ are what Phillip Brian Harper calls ‘a prime signifier of European beauty’, the actual and threatened cutting of Clotel’s – and Birdie’s – hair represents an attempt by Mrs. French and Maria, respectively, ‘to “Africanize” their appearance’ and thus render them less alluring to both white and black men.22 For, as Maria asks Birdie, ‘You think Ali’s gonna like you when you don’t got no hair?’ (Caucasia, p. 47)23

In Middlesex, Calliope is alerted to her own difference by the pubescent changes taking place in her peers’ bodies.

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.