Gender and identity formation in developmental contexts

Gender and Identity Formation in Robinson's Housekeeping and Baldwin's "Blues for Mister Charlie"

Both the novel Housekeeping by Marilynn Robinson and the play "Blues for Mister Charlie" by James Baldwin deal with coming of age identity conflicts amongst marginalized peoples and long-simmering community conflicts that come to a boil after the homecoming of one of the protagonists. Robinson's text is framed around the coming of age of young women growing up in rural Idaho in the mid-1900s. The girls experience a crisis of feminine identity after they are deprived of their mother, who commits suicide at the beginning of the book. One of the girls in Robinson's text, Ruth, is unwilling to submit herself to the conventional norms and constructions of gender formulation common to the era, while Lucille follows these gendered norms rigorously, in a hope to find refuge in a 'normal' life of womanhood outside of the madness of her family, a family that seems only to know how to die, rather than how to sustain life.

Blues for Mister Charlie" deals with the Black experience of isolation in America. The play centers on the difficulty of young Black people, men and women, who must force their lives and souls to conform to the norms of the White 'Mister Charlie.' Mister Charlie of the title was a common epithet for White people in the Black community at the time. Tumult occurs in the small Southern town after Richard, a native son of the area, returns home after living in the North. Richard is murdered, but his death and his identity struggles before his murder at the hands of racist Southern Whites, demonstrates the inability of Black men to express their masculinity in positive ways in White America. The play suggests that the repertoire of identity construction for Black men is limited to passive withdrawal in the South, embodied by the religious establishment of the town, or violent rage, as embodied by the musician, former drug abuser Richard.

For Black women, however, Baldwin has slightly less concern in terms of how the norms of their identities are formulated, even though women have a powerful stage presence over the course of the play. Thus Baldwin tends to reduce the importance of the Black female experience of marginalization in America for the Black community as a whole. It is how Black men formulate their new identities within oppressive structures that the author claims as his play's main concern. Continually, "Blues for Mister Charlie" stresses the commonality of all Black oppression and the investiture Black men and women have in creating a positive Black masculine ideal.

The play was written in response to the Emmett Till lynching of real life, a lynching spawned by a Northern Black youngster whistling at a White Southern women. Finding a way to create Black male sexuality in a way that is empowering, and will not bring the wrath of society down upon its head is Baldwin's concern. Until society can accept Black men's masculinity and sexuality, Blacks as a people will not be free. As for white women, like Jo Britten, the wife of the likely murder suspect, her complaints about a lack of empowerment for Southern White femininity, such as her moan that she is always serving coffee, seem small and absurd when contrasted with the expansiveness of the grief of Richard's father and the rage that Richard's murder releases in the oppressed Black Southern community.

Very well for White women, but what of Black women, in this construction of male and female identities in a community town between Blacks and Whites? Baldwin acknowledges female Black women's oppression, but he has greater hope for Black women's sources of resistance in the form of childbearing and Church-bound faith, although he looks down at the latter as corrupted by White influence that stifles Black (male) rage in a feminine way, focusing on the life to come rather than the here and now.

Baldwin suggests that Black female identity is less problematic for White society, and for Black women themselves. Only as Black female identity relates to Black male sexuality, does it have a presence in the narrative. In contrast, Robinson's all-White world focuses on the difficulties of the female gender exclusively, although it does not contain the complex relationships between race, sexuality, and gender in the construction of a young woman's identity. Female identity is problematic in Housekeeping. Racial identity is not problematic for the author.

There are, of course, some commonalities in both texts that grapple with issues of social isolation and the difficulty of constructing the self in a place, and during an era, where one's inner impulses towards freedom are denied because of who one is as either Black or female. For example, Robinson's character of Ruth is unwilling to assimilate to mainstream society and womanhood. Because of her mother's early death, Ruth lacks a coherent vision of womanhood, and refuses to be lady-like; she only bases her identity as a woman upon the sight of her aunt Sylvie. Thus Ruth's identity has become formatted around being a tomboy, or a boy who acts like a girl.

Similarly, the Black male characters of Baldwin's "Blues for Mister Charlie" face a White society ridden with oppressive structures that prevent them from fully expressing their identity. However, rather than a male vs. female dichotomy, Baldwin's play is structured around a Black vs. White dichotomy in which gender does not motivate the characters to ask searching questions about what constitutes 'the self.' Even the relatively conservative Reverend Meridian Henry, the pastor of the Black church in a the play, asks Parnell, a White man, plaintively if he, Parnell, has only chosen to befriend Henry because he thinks of the Reverend as his favorite Uncle Tom?

Thus, unlike in Robinson's text, in Baldwin's play, men, specifically Black men experience a similar anxiety about who they are, and how they fit into society as fully-fledged human beings, as men.

If female gender, in this portrayal of Black male anxiety, can be said to play a dramatic role, it is usually, if anything, a positive player, as Baldwin's women often show hidden strengths against the White system that his male protagonists may lack, such as the matriarch Mother Henry. It is difficult to imagine Mother Henry experiencing similar doubts about who she is, or asking a White man to define her identity, as does the Reverend. At the end of the play, Baldwin demonstrates his belief that the experience of birth provides Black women with at least some positive sense of self-construction in a racist society, while birth and female normative structures of gender in Robinson's tale of Housekeeping are life-destroying for many women in the text, such as Ruth, Sylvie, and Helen.

At the beginning of Robinson's tale, the death of Ruth's mother Helen is presented as a death of the woman's ability to cope with her limited venue as a woman in society. At first, Ruth's mother tries to escape via a car. But the car gets bogged down, literally, in the mire of her past, a woman shackled to her family to the end. "They searched for her. Word was sent out a hundred miles in every direction to watch for a young woman in a car," that "I [Ruth] said was blue and Lucille said was green. Some boys who had been fishing and knew nothing about the search had come across her sitting cross-legged on the roof of the car, which had bogged down in the meadow between the road and the cliff." Ruth's mother looks placid, and on the surface seems to conform to female notions of gentility and politesse. This false image conceals desperation, desperation that the fishing boys cannot see. The veneer of the town might be paralleled with the politeness of the Southern town of Baldwin's play, but Robinson is concerned, not with the town's whiteness, but with its oppressive strictures upon women.

The pain of Helen is invisible to male eyes. "They said she was gazing at the lake and eating wild strawberries, which were prodigiously large and abundant that year. She asked them very pleasantly to help her push her car out of the mud, and they went so far as to put their blankets and coats under the wheels to facilitate her rescue. When they got the Ford back to the road she thanked them, gave them her purse, rolled down the rear windows, started the car, turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go, and roared swerving and sliding across the meadow until she sailed off the edge of the cliff." Freedom, in Ruth's mother's eyes, came only in death, as she seeks to return to the same place that her father drowned himself. In Helen's eyes, a woman cannot exist without a man, a terrible lesson for her daughter, who spurns all constructions of femininity.

Specifically, Helen cannot face a return to the town of Fingerbone with her daughters as "chastened" woman (p. 62), a society with "shallow-rooted" norms (p. 177), a "meager and difficult place" as opposed to the expansive way Ruth wishes to grow as a woman. (p. 178) Helen's storm inside, this mother's crisis of identity, has parallels not with Baldwin's women, but with characters such as the Reverend Henry, whose anger at White society can only be expressed in a eulogy over his beloved son's casket. Extremity in both the apparently placid Henry and Helen brings forth rage and despair, but while at least Henry's male rage is life-affirming, urging his community to go on in the face of the death of a young person, Helen's actions are regressive, infantile, returning to her father, and do not occur as an act of social protest.

The gendered constructions of mourning and identity formulation for Helen's daughters Ruth and Lucille also indicate the limited repertoire the Housekeeping society provides for women to express themselves and create a positive sense of identity in Robinson's world. This frustration of female expression is particular to the gender-designated female sphere. For instance, the girl's grandmother spends her days in her bedroom, on her armchair like a female Victorian invalid, unmoving and looking out into the orchard, and being cared for by her friends. She repeats cliches to the bereaved girls. "So long as you look after your health," their grandmother tells Ruth and Lucille, "and own the roof above your head, you're as safe as anyone can be, God willing," even though her own life history seems to belie this, as her husband and daughter both committed suicide in the same fashion. (p. 27).

But grief, rather than retirement on the part of women, creates positive rage in the heart of Black men in Baldwin. "Learn to walk like men," preaches Percy Rodriguez after hearing the Reverend Henry speak about his dead son, to his fellow Black men in the congregation. Resistance and manhood are conjoined in Baldwin's text -- White society takes male virility away, thus Black men must take it back, as they take back their lives, or else die suffering in the process. This is demonstrated in the fact that Richard, for all of his rage is the only Black character who has lived up North and always has a much more positive version and vision of male identity than Black men who have only lived in the South, although Black Southern women do not always see themselves as so downtrodden in their own self-perception, even if society may strive to harm them physically and spiritually.

Maleness and racial empowerment in Baldwin are won, female struggles such as Juanita's involvement with the White Parnell as well as with Richard are symbolic of the community's division and corruption between different ideals of racial construction, of White Southern feminization of the Black male that drives Black women to seek the arms of White men, or of Black men who truly embrace their racial identity. Juanita's own search for selfhood is not given full credence -- it is not allied with the empowerment of the movement as is Black male empowerment, and the take-back of Black rights and virility attempted over the course of the play.

However, no sources of movement-creating rage are open to women in Robinson's Housekeeping. After the death of Helen and the inability of their grandmother to cope with her grief, Ruth and Lucille are taken under the wing of Sylvie, their eccentric aunt. Sylvie seems to defy such feminine constructions as she lives the life of a hard-edged and outsider-like transient. However, Sylvie's refusal to conform to a life of feminine norms is clearly difficult for her as well as for the girls as they grow up under her care. Her refusal to obey conventional feminine norms comes at a great personal cost to her, just as refusing to obey Southern norms of Black malehood proves hard for Richard.

Richard is killed, and Sylvie thinks of suicide like Helen and her father. She dreams of throwing her body on the railroad tracks and ding under a train's wheels. (p.81) This sort of death-driven behavior forces the two girls, as her actions becomes increasingly strange, to make a choice between two incomplete feminine norms of either marriage or wandering. Lucille determines that she will lead a conventional life, and eventually separates herself from her peculiar aunt, a choice that she begins when she insists on dressing like everyone else in her class, the first day she goes to school. Ruth 'checks out' of society and joins the bitter life of Sylvie, forever wandering.

Although Ruth's choice may be more exciting, it is a hard choice, just as Richard's choice to resist is hard and harsh. "The appearance of relative solidity in my grandmothers house was deceptive," Ruth concludes, reflecting upon the death of her mother and grandfather, musing, "it is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing" (pp. 158-59) But to have nothing is not a happy choice, nor it is a complete and fulfilling choice, demonstrating that female constructions of either normal or outsider identity, as embodied in the lives of the two girls, are incomplete.

In their grandmother's house, after their mother's death, the girls see what they are expected to become, as they age, "the gentle and formal society of friends and mourners that had established itself in her house to look after things. Her [the grandmothers'] friends were very old, and fond of white cake and pinochle. In twos and threes they would volunteer to look after us, while the others played cards at the breakfast table. We would be walked around by nervous, peremptory old men who would show us Spanish coins, and watches, and miniature jackknives with numerous blades designed to be serviceable in any extremity, in order to keep us near them and out of the path of possible traffic." This scene of religiously inspired docility has parallels in Baldwin's play which similarly critiques the initial Black church compliance with a racist society, however, death breaks the chains of oppression, while here Helen's death falls upon silent ears.

Most chillingly, the girls note the presence of "a tiny old lady named Ettie, whose flesh was the color of toadstools and whose memory was so eroded as to make her incapable of bidding, and who sat smiling by herself in the porch, took me by the hand once and told me that in San Francisco, before the fire, she had lived near a cathedral, and in the house opposite lived a Catholic lady who kept a huge parrot on her balcony. When the bells rang the lady would come out with a shawl over her head and she would pray, and the parrot would pray with her, the woman's voice and the parrot's voice, on and on, between clamor and clangor. After a while the woman fell ill, or at least stopped coming out on her balcony, but the parrot was still there, and it whistled and prayed and flirted its tail whenever the bell rang. The fire took the church and its bells and no doubt the parrot, too, and quite possibly the Catholic lady. Ettie waved it all away with her hand and pretended to sleep." This existence, where female articulation comes not from a woman's lips, but from a chattering parrot, in a world that stifles and is filled with cards and white cake and softness, is incomprehensible to Ruth, and only of limited comfort to Lucille, even though she eventually embraces this ideal, as she has little else to find her sense of 'self' within, other than the negative example of Sylvie.