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

Siobhan Somervilles essay Passing through the Closet 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 story is argued to be a resource used to question the dominance or implicit strength of heterosexuality in the African-American community over Black women. While I do believe Hopkins may have intended for the novel to raise questions about the institution of marriage in relation to the African-American female, I do not believe the course is as polarised as a difference mingled with homosexual and heterosexual attraction in relation to politics between the sexes. Instead, I would argue that the truly ambiguity of sexuality within the text serves to comment on a larger issue of what makes a woman female and the importance of intimate bonds between women in society.The most important piece of textual evidence in Somervilles argument is the att ic scene between Dora and Sappho. In this scene Sappho begs Dora to go through 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 flatcar 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. New York Monthly Review Press, 1975. 157-210.Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces A Romance Illustrative of Negro animation North and South. New York Oxford Universit y Press, 1988.Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Ed. Rodney Needham. Trans. James Harls Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Boston Beacon Press, 1969.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men English Literature and Homosocial Desire. New York capital of South Carolina University Press, 1985.Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. The Female World of Love and Ritual Relations 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