{"id":147906,"date":"2020-09-28T11:50:07","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T15:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=147906"},"modified":"2020-09-28T12:14:42","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T16:14:42","slug":"feminize-your-canon-alice-dunbar-nelson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/09\/28\/feminize-your-canon-alice-dunbar-nelson\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Alice Dunbar-Nelson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Alice Dunbar-Nelson<\/p><\/div>\n

In April 1895, the up-and-coming poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed \u201cthe most promising young colored man in America,\u201d saw a poem by a young writer, Alice Ruth Moore, accompanied by a photograph in which she appeared stylish and beautiful. He wrote to her immediately at her home on Palmyra Street in New Orleans, expressing his admiration, and they began an intense epistolary courtship that lasted two years. Six months in, Paul was declaring. \u201cI love you and have loved you since the first time I saw your picture.\u201d He called Alice \u201cthe sudden realization of an ideal!\u201d She combined beauty with literary talent and the feminine accomplishments appropriate to an upper-class young woman of the day: \u201cDo you recite? Do you sing? Don\u2019t you dance divinely?\u201d They modeled themselves self-consciously after Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, another pair of lovers and writers whose romance began by letter. Paul referred to \u201cThis Mr. and Mrs. Browning affair of ours,\u201d and Alice, after they\u2019d married, reflected on her role as a wife who was at once muse, colleague, and practical support: \u201cWe worked together, read together, and I flattered myself that I helped him in his work. I was his amanuensis and secretary, and he was good enough to write poem after poem \u2018for me,\u2019 he said.\u201d The Dunbars embodied the aspirational ideal of the educated, cultured African American, allowed access to the white halls of fame and power as long as they were willing to remain, flattened and fixed, in the roles of representatives of their race.<\/p>\n

Such a role did not allow for physical passion and disorder. When the couple met in person, the refinements of their written courtship became scrawled over with violence. In November 1897, in what Paul described as \u201cone damned night of folly,\u201d he raped Alice, leaving her with internal injuries. Five months later, the couple eloped. The marriage lasted four years, and ended as violently as it had begun, with a drunken beating. Alice left, and never returned. Paul tried to woo her back with letters, but she answered only once, with a single word delivered by telegram: No<\/em>. When he died of tuberculosis in February 1906, at the age of thirty-three, she found out by reading a notice in the newspaper. Yet despite their estrangement, Alice worked hard after Paul\u2019s death to keep his reputation and his work alive, reading his poetry in public and, in 1920, editing The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer<\/em>, a hefty anthology of\u00a0\u201cthe best prose and poetic selections by and about the Negro race,\u201d including many selections by Paul, but also her own poetry and selections by writers from James Weldon Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, with the\u00a0\u201cCaucasian\u201d writers denoted by an asterisk. (Alice\u2019s portrait, rather than Paul\u2019s, appears as a frontispiece.)<\/p>\n

Brief though it was, Alice Moore\u2019s marriage to Paul Dunbar has tended to overshadow her achievements as a writer, even though she outlived him by three decades and married twice more. For many years, according to Katherine Adams, Sandra A. Zagarell, and Caroline Gebhard, the editors of Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the Twenty-First Century<\/em><\/a>, a 2016 special issue of the women\u2019s literature journal Legacy<\/em>, her marriage was \u201cthe only thing making her visible and the primary thing obscuring her from view.\u201d That ironic combination, a spotlight partially covered, is a fate she shares with many talented wives of famous men. The variety of names she adopted\u2014Alice Ruth Moore, Alice Dunbar, Alice Moore Dunbar, Mrs. Paul Dunbar, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Aliceruth Dunbar-Nelson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson\u2014reflects the basic tension between a woman\u2019s marital identity and her declaration of herself as an author. Highly educated, with a strong belief in her own talent and determination to make her own living, Dunbar-Nelson was a New Woman, that protofeminist figure who dominated American culture at the turn of the twentieth century, yet she also recognized and embraced marriage as essential to a woman\u2019s social standing. \u201cIt is not marriage I decry, for I don\u2019t think any really sane person would do this,\u201d she wrote in \u201cThe Woman,\u201d a story in her first collection Violets and Other Tales<\/em>, published in 1895. But despite this declaration, the same piece contains voluminous arguments in favor of the single life.\u00a0Critics who have wanted to pin her down to one identity, one genre, or one set of beliefs about race or gender, have struggled to do so. Appreciating the variety of her work requires a nuanced attention to the many layers of her life.<\/p>\n

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born on July 19, 1875, in New Orleans. For a writer who otherwise documented her life meticulously, and whose diary, correspondence, and reams of unpublished writing exist in an extensive archive, she was mostly silent about her early life. In one letter to Paul, her distress is palpable when he presses on the sore point of her origins: \u201cDearest\u2014dearest\u2014I hate to write this\u2014How often, oh how painfully often, when scarce meaning [to] you have thrust my parentage in my face.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a light-skinned Black woman operating within the blunt racial binary of post\u2013Civil War America, that silence signifies both shame and strategy. In her hometown of New Orleans, Dunbar-Nelson had a third option for a racial identity. Before the Civil War, the city\u2019s population was divided between whites, enslaved blacks, and free gens de couleur<\/em>,\u00a0light-skinned Creoles of French or Spanish descent, who were a\u00a0powerful and elite social group. This was the identity Dunbar-Nelson claimed for herself, and the figure who dominates her early short stories. She likened the\u00a0\u201ctrue Creole\u201d to\u00a0\u201cthe famous gumbo of\u00a0the state, a little of everything, making a whole dilightfullly [sic<\/em>] flavored, quite distinctive, and wholly unique.\u201d It was also a status that carried little weight outside New Orleans, in a world where the color line was brutally policed. In several stories, Dunbar-Nelson explored the anxiety of passing and the pain of colorist prejudice. Her short story \u201cThe Stones of the Village,\u201d dramatizes the bullying and exclusion that her light-skinned hero endures from both the black and white boys of his village. But instead of trying to claim a place among his own people, the boy decides to pass as white. The story traces his Dickensian journey from his grandmother\u2019s village to a job working for an elderly book dealer in New Orleans, and then via a legacy in the old man\u2019s will to college, law school, and eventually marriage to a white woman and a position as a respected judge. Throughout his career his fear of being exposed drives him to overt and virulent racist treatment of \u201cNegroes.\u201d Eventually he learns that an up-and-coming African American lawyer knows his true identity but agrees to keep it quiet in exchange for fair treatment in court. Her unpublished story \u201cBrass Ankles Speaks\u201d hews closer to Dunbar-Nelson\u2019s own experience, narrated by a speaker who describes herself as \u201cwhite enough to pass for white, but with a darker family background, a real love for the mother race, and no desire to be numbered among the white race.\u201d Her anger throughout the piece is directed at darker-skinned Black people who tease and ostracize her, resenting both her ability to pass and her decision not to.<\/p>\n

Eleanor Alexander, the author of Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow<\/a><\/em>, a biography of the Dunbar marriage, detects in Alice\u2019s status anxiety and her flashes of contempt for her much darker husband an attitude of internalized racism, or at least classism and colorism, that caused her to distance herself from the designation \u201cNegro.\u201d But other critics make the point that she proudly declared herself a \u201crace woman\u201d and that her identity as African American was never \u201cmasked\u201d or concealed from readers. \u201cThis is a writer who embraced and labored incessantly on behalf of black people, including herself, and understood that work to require an interrogation of belonging\u2014a refusal to make a piety of it,\u201d write Adams, Zagarell, and Gebhard. Dunbar-Nelson grew up in an era preoccupied with questions of racial belonging and definition, which included a campaign to capitalize the word \u201cNegro\u201d as a question of dignity. She seems, however, to have resisted the idea that race was reducible to labels or symbols, exploring it instead as a variable, and highly individual, lived experience.<\/p>\n

According to Alexander, although Dunbar-Nelson saw the category \u201cNegro\u201d as denoting a formerly enslaved person and thus distanced herself from it, her own family history was more closely embedded with slavery than with free Creole society. On the scraps of evidence afforded by birth certificates, name changes, and city records, Alexander pieces together the origins of Alice Moore as the daughter and granddaughter of women who were formerly enslaved. Her father\u2019s identity is uncertain, as is the question of whether he was married to her mother, or whether Alice and her older sister had the same father\u2014either way, he was not part of her life. Alice\u2019s mother, Patsy, and grandmother, Mary, worked as servants and washerwomen, as many Black women did: part of a huge labor force that helped clean and clothe the upper classes. Together they made sure that Alice and her sister, Leila, were shielded from this work and kept away from their employers\u2019 homes\u2014a common protective strategy by servants, who knew the sexual exploitation and violence that routinely went on in those homes. Instead, Patsy and Mary worked to consolidate a class status for Alice and Leila by giving them an education they themselves had not received. Alice was first sent away as a young teenager to Southern University in Baton Rouge, and graduated from the prestigious Straight (now Dillard) University in New Orleans in 1892 with a teaching qualification. Teaching offered a route into elite society for African American women, who dominated the profession (in Washington, D.C., a few years before Alice moved there with Paul, women made up more than 80 percent of the city\u2019s Black schoolteachers).<\/p>\n

Alice\u2019s first book was published in 1895, when she was barely twenty years old. Violets and Other Tales<\/em> was a multigenre collection of poetry, stories, sketches, and essays rooted in New Orleans Creole society\u2014\u201cpieces of exquisite art,\u201d as Paul, who was courting Alice when the book was being published, described them. Its reception in the press is a reminder of how absolute the division was at this time between works by Black and white artists. In the African American press, the book and its author were effusively praised, as much for what they represented\u2014the \u201cbest of the race\u201d\u2014as for the specifics of the work. The Daily Picayune<\/em>, the city\u2019s white-run paper, denounced it as \u201cslop\u201d\u2014which Gebhard argues was punishment for \u201chaving crossed the color line by presuming to submit it for review at all.\u201d Interestingly, Dunbar-Nelson used the same pejorative years later when reassessing her early collection, which is undeniably sentimental, as was the style of its era. But its themes would linger into her next, and today best-known, collection, The Goodness of St. Roque, and Other Stories<\/em><\/a> (1897), even though she left New Orleans for good the following year at the age of twenty-one.<\/p>\n

In 1897, Alice moved to New York City, where she worked with writer and activist Victoria Earle Matthews at the White Rose Mission, a settlement home for working-class Black girls on East Eighty-Sixth Street. She continued to write, working on an unpublished collection of stories about the new community in which she found herself. She was a clubwoman, the main arena for African American women\u2019s activism at the time, and an active supporter of women\u2019s suffrage. In 1902, when her marriage to Paul Dunbar ended, Alice moved to Wilmington, Delaware, and began to work as a teacher at Howard High School, where she had an intimate friendship with the (considerably older) school principal Edwina B. Kruse, one of several important relationships with women over the course of her life. She stayed at Howard until 1920, when she was fired for her political radicalism. For Dunbar-Nelson, teaching was both a creative outlet and a form of political engagement: she wrote plays for her students to perform, and shared with her friend W.E.B. Du Bois a belief in the transformative power of the classroom for African Americans, and the importance for Black children of stories that centered Black characters\u2014lamenting in her essay \u201cNegro Literature for Negro Pupils\u201d that \u201cfor two generations we have given brown and black children a blonde ideal of beauty to worship, a milk-white literature to assimilate, and a pearly Paradise to anticipate, in which their dark faces would be hopelessly out of place.\u201d In her diary, which she kept daily for most of her life, she also recorded less lofty reactions to the daily grind of the classroom, as in this outburst from 1897: \u201cExhausted? I feel like a dishrag. 62 untamed odoriferous kids all day\u2026 Fiends, just fiends pure and simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout her time in Delaware, Dunbar-Nelson\u2019s activism continued. She wrote for Du Bois\u2019s The Crisis<\/em> on women\u2019s suffrage and became a field organizer for the\u00a0campaign in\u00a0Pennsylvania. In 1916, she married Robert J. Nelson, a journalist and politician, and together with him edited and published a progressive newspaper, the\u00a0Wilmington Advocate<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In her diary, she also detailed the romantic relationships she had with women, including the Los Angeles\u2013based activist Fay Jackson Robinson and artist Helene Ricks London, in entries that are sometimes tortured, but often frank and celebratory. They reveal a woman who, in private, was not afraid to cast off the constraints of respectability. In 1928, she described an evening with a group of women who were, like herself, married clubwomen: \u201cWe want to make whoopee\u2026 Life is glorious. Good homemade white grape wine. We really make whoopee\u2026 Such a glorious moonlight night.\u201d Selections from her diary were edited and published in 1984 by Dunbar-Nelson\u2019s literary champion Akasha Gloria Hull as Give Us Each Day<\/em>, a landmark in Black feminist literary history and a vibrant glimpse into the writer\u2019s inner life, now unfortunately out of print.<\/p>\n

In the twenties, the cultural and political explosion of the Harlem Renaissance swept Alice Dunbar-Nelson up in its trail, even though she had not lived in New York for many years and was still based in Delaware. Her poetry, much of it written earlier, was rediscovered through its appearance in journals and collections like The Crisis<\/em>, Opportunity<\/em>, and the 1927 collection Ebony and Topaz.<\/em> She was friends with most of the leading lights of the era, especially Du Bois and the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, but she had her differences with them, too. She critiqued the novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset\u2019s generally well-received novel Plum Bun<\/em>, rejecting the \u201cinjudicious laudation\u201d that she worried was coming to a Black writer purely on the basis of race. She wanted a bigger frame, and laid claim to a white literary canon that was as much her heritage as any other, writing a scholarly dissertation on Wordsworth, with whom she shared a love of nature. One of her best-known poems celebrates the natural beauty of a violet in nature by contrasting it with the artifice of its copy in an urban setting, where the idea of the flower calls to mind: \u201cflorists\u2019 shops, \/ And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine; \/ And garish lights, and mincing little fops \/ And cabarets and songs, and deadening wine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite her early reputation as a poet, during the twenties Alice Dunbar-Nelson found her voice more and more as a journalist. She wrote a syndicated column, Une Femme Dit, and contributed a wealth of reviews and essays to newspapers and magazines. She was an in-demand speaker and although she was rarely paid well for it, she recognized the importance of maintaining a public profile against the twin forces of gendered and racial erasure. In her diary she was open about her constant struggle for money, lamenting in 1931: \u201cthe depression hit my royalties!\u201d But she also blamed herself for her inability to find a stable footing in a field dominated by white men. Her work was so often uncredited, unpaid, or both. \u201cDamn bad luck I have with my pen,\u201d she wrote in her diary. \u201cSome fate has decreed I shall never make money by it.\u201d Yet in her energy and appetite for life\u2019s pleasures, from the literary to the human to the natural, Alice Dunbar-Nelson celebrated beauty and freedom to the end of her life. Thanks to the scholars who\u2019ve fought to resurrect her legacy, she may finally have the broader recognition she deserves, as a prolific, politically engaged writer whose poetry is only the beginning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Feminize Your Canon here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Joanna<\/span>\u00a0Scutts<\/span>\u00a0is a cultural historian and critic, and the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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