Abstract
Older black women have historically been portrayed as the matriarch or the Black Mammy and featured in stereotypical roles to assist white families within mainstream US visual culture. In literary fiction, African American painter and writer Clarence Major utilises African American speech acts and humour as key elements of his narrative to negotiate the mature identity of his 60+-year-old protagonist, Annie Eliza, in his relatively unknown novel Such Was the Season. As part of the African American canon of the late twentieth century, I argue that Major seeks to document the experiences of ageing black women in fictional literature and to establish their lives and experiences as legitimate themes for mainstream audiences.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See the study conducted by Judith de Luce in 2001 of 31 common US magazines, which found relatively few advertisements featuring older women and none depicting ageing black women. See also the findings of Meredith Tupper’s (2015) study concerning the representation of the elderly in prime time television commercials in 1995 that featured only 0.12% of older African Americans despite their 1% population as of the 1990 US census.
- 3.
See Reid (2005, 81–84).
- 4.
Myrna Hant (2001) makes a similar argument for an increased and more diverse representation of ageing regarding the portrayal of older white women in quality television shows in the twenty-first century. Margaret Tally analyses recent Hollywood movies that explore sexual (re)awakening in older protagonists and also notes a recent increase in mainstream films that target older female audiences (2006, 37–39).
- 5.
For more on issues regarding “authenticity” in the black middle class, see Smith (1998, 63–68).
- 6.
See Bell’s comment that Annie Eliza initially appears to be more “folksy than folk” (1994, 90)—a stereotypical representation of a matriarchal figure in the black community.
- 7.
- 8.
Julie Winterich notes in a small study that African American women seem less affected in their self-confidence and self-valuation by their greying hair and other markers of ageing. She attributes this to their marginalised status in US society (2007, 63).
- 9.
Penny Ralston notes that elderly black women are less likely to mention their health problems, as part of a coping strategy and within a “conspiracy of silence,” so as not to affect the well-being of family members with their ailments (1997, 280).
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Fürst, S.M. (2017). African American Humour and the Construction of a Mature Female Middle-Class Identity in Clarence Major’s Such Was the Season . In: McGlynn, C., O'Neill, M., Schrage-Früh, M. (eds) Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63609-2_16
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