Material Spirituality in Modernist Women's Writing by Elizabeth Anderson;

Author:Elizabeth Anderson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Maud Martha’s childhood home

I turn now to Maud Martha’s childhood home: the space in the text where the life histories of things are most evident. In Maud Martha we see a more implicit and tenuous generational transmission than that described by hooks. Maud Martha’s relationship to her childhood home is presented as unique among her family. In the chapter in which the Browns’ home ownership is under threat, Maud Martha, her mother and sister Helen share an awkward period of waiting in which they respond differently to the possibility of losing their home.73 Brooks highlights the distinctness of Maud Martha’s connection to the house, which is different from her mother’s and sister’s. As in Their Eyes Were Watching God, the porch is a significant place in Maud Martha, yet this scene is very different from Janie’s ‘porch talk’ with Phoebe that enables her subjectivity. This scene shows how Maud Martha is formed by her domestic environment and how the family is held by this space and yet the differences are also revealed: family solidarity is fractured. Racist housing policy and finance bring contingency and threaten the homespace. Janie and Phoebe’s space is guaranteed by Janie’s independence and financial security. Although bell hooks frames Black domestic space as separate from possession, Hurston’s and Brooks’s novels show how a lack of legal possession and financial security leads to a precarity in the homespace that can be painful and alienating.74

This moment in Maud Martha is also different from the first time we see reference to the porch (this time the back one) in the opening sentence of the novel: ‘The west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch’ (1). Here the steps of the porch (even closer to the outside than the rocking chairs) are aligned with the freedom, drama and change of the sunset sky. The changeable sky is contrasted with the security of the home, both are required for the fullness of the experience. In the later chapter that marks the precarity of homespace, Maud Martha invokes the sky again, emphasizing the connection between the particularity of house and sky: ‘She felt that the little line of white, some ridged with smoked purple, and all that cream-shot saffron, would never drift across any western sky except that in back of this house’ (30).

Brooks makes the similarity between father’s and daughter’s love for the house more explicit in the following chapter when she writes: ‘Who was it who sympathised with him in his almost desperate love for this old house? Who followed him about, emotionally speaking, loving this, doting on that?’ (37–8) These sentences conclude a paragraph in which Maud Martha has noted her father’s preference for her sister Helen and we understand that Maud Martha’s father does not deliberately teach his daughter his love for the home or even recognize that they share this passion.75 Maud Martha goes on to detail how she loves the house as her father does and to assert that the unlovely may still be loveable.

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