Siobhan Somerville’s essay Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hop

Siobhan Somervilles essay Passing by the pressing in Pauline E. Hopkinss Contending ForcesIn Siobhan Somervilles essay, Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkinss Contending Forces, the tacit allusion to homosexuality within Hopkins apologue is turn overd to be a resource used to question the dominance or implicit strength of straight apartity in the African-American community over Black women. While I do believe Hopkins may pick out intended for the novel to raise questions about the institution of marriage in relation to the African-American female, I do not believe the railway line is as polarized as a difference amidst homosexual and heterosexual attraction in relation to politics between the sexes. Instead, I would argue that the very ambiguity of sexuality within the text serves to comment on a larger issue of what makes a woman female and the grandness of intimate bonds between women in society.The most important piece of textual evidence in Somervilles argume nt is the attic scene between Dora and Sappho. In this scene Sappho begs Dora to spend the morning with her after a snowstorm from the previous night makes it impossible for her to go to work. The two lock themselves away in Sapphos attic apartment and commence to have a tea party and play company like the children (Hopkins 117). In her essay, Somerville describes this as a highly sexualized scene, in which the intimacy between the two women hints at a possible homosexual attraction between the two, given the homoerotic description of their affection towards one another (Somerville 149-152). While I do believe the scene does have a certain element of homoerotic tension, I would not go so far as to polarize the scene as clearly homosexual as a pot... ...al Economy of Sex. Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. pertly York Monthly Review Press, 1975. 157-210.Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces A Romance Illustrative of blackamoor Life North and South. New York Oxfo rd University Press, 1988.Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Ed. Rodney Needham. Trans. James Harls Bell and derriere Richard von Sturmer. Boston Beacon Press, 1969.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men English literary works and Homosocial Desire. New York Columbia University Press, 1985.Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. The Female World of Love and Ritual dealings between Women in Nineteenth-Century America. Signs, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1975). 25 Oct. 2005 .Somerville, Siobhan. Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkinss Contending Forces American Literature, Vol 69, No 1, (1997). 19 Oct. 2005