The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction

by Ann DuCille

What does the tradition of marriage mean for people who have historically been deprived of its legal status? Generally thought of as a convention of the white middle class, the marriage plot has received little attention from critics of African-American literature. In this study, Ann duCille uses texts such as Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) to demonstrate that the African-American novel, like its European and Anglo-American counterparts, has developed around the marriage plot--what she calls "the coupling convention." Exploring the relationship between racial ideology and literary and social conventions, duCille uses the coupling convention to trace the historical development of the African-American women's novel. She demonstrates the ways in which black women appropriated this novelistic device as a means of expressing and reclaiming their own identity. More than just a study of the marriage tradition in black women's
fiction, however, The Coupling Convention takes up and takes on many different meanings of tradition. It challenges the notion of a single black literary tradition, or of a single black feminist literary canon grounded in specifically black female language and experience, as it explores the ways in which white and black, male and female, mainstream and marginalized "traditions" and canons have influenced and cross-fertilized each other. Much more than a period study, The Coupling Convention spans the period from 1853 to 1948, addressing the vital questions of gender, subjectivity, race, and the canon that inform literary study today. In this original work, duCille offers a new paradigm for reading black women's fiction.

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Coupling Convention examines the marriage plot in African American (mostly women’s) fiction. duCille specifically uses the phrase “coupling convention” to trouble the way marriage as a legal category was historically unavailable to African Americans and remains so for queer couples. Key to her study is the examination of marriage as an institution with socially-vested meanings that change over time and according to context. Moreover, she disputes the idea of an African-American literary tradition or of an African-American women’s literary tradition. Her study constantly questions ideas of authenticity that have shaped the contemporary canon of African American literary tradition. Her work should be situated alongside that of Hazel Carby and Claudia Tate.

She begins her study with texts from the mid-nineteenth-century and ends with the final novel of Zora Neale Hurston, published in the 1940s. She talks broadly about three different time periods. In the first period writers including William Wells Brown, Harriet Wilson and Harriet Jacobs utilized conventional sentimental literature and the mulatta figure to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the patriarchal system of marriage alongside its denial to African American men and women. These texts claimed marriage as a civil right. Turn of the century texts such as those by France Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Anna Julia Cooper utilized similar strategies, fitting the marriage convention into their own political and in some cases spiritual critiques. The last section of the book focuses specifically on representations of the African American female body in relationship to African American women’s subjectivity. She reclaims texts dismissed in the context of the Harlem Renaissance as embracing bourgeoisie ideologies, insisting that Fauset and Larsen are misread, and rather critique the bourgeoisie ideologies the texts foreground. These texts critiqued marriage “as marital horror than as hearthside harmony” (144).

DuCille provides a chapter that describes the political landscape of Harlem Renaissance literary figures, which I found very useful. In particular, I was unfamiliar with Jessie Fauset. As the literary editor of The Crisis, she encouraged and published writers such as Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and Gloria Douglas Johnson. Some say she “invented” the Harlem Renaissance because of her influence of key figures. Her close readings were thought-provoking and I especially appreciated her reading of Hurston’s work.