Abstract

When Gwendolyn Brooks ' autobiographical first novel, Maud Martha, was published in 1953 it was given the kind of ladylike treatment that assured its dismissal. Reviewers invariably chose to describe the novel in words that reflected what they considered the novel's appropriate feminine values. The young black woman heroine was called a "spunky Negro girl" as though the novel were a piece of juvenile fiction. Reviewers, in brief notices of the novel, insisted on its optimism and faith: Maud's life is made up of "moments she loved," she has "disturbances," but she "struggles against jealousy" for the sake of her marriage; there is, of course, "the delicate pressure of the color line," but Maud has the remarkable "ability to turn unhappiness and anger into a joke." Brooks ' style was likened to the exquisite delicacy of a lyric poem. The New York Times reviewer said the novel reminded him of Imagist poems, of "clusters of ideograms from which one recreates connected experience."

Theme of Rage and Silence in Maud Martha

Introduction

In 1953 no one seemed prepared to call Maud Martha a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred and the silence that results from suppressed anger. No one recognized it as a novel dealing with the very sexism and racism that these reviews enshrined. What the reviewers saw as exquisite lyricism was actually the truncated stuttering of a woman whose rage makes her literally unable to speak (Madhubuti, 85).

This autobiographical novel is about silences. Maud Martha rarely speaks aloud to anyone else. She has learned to conceal her feelings behind a mask of gentility, to make her hate silent and cold, expressed only in the most manipulative and deceptive ways. When she is irritated with her husband, Paul, who pinches her on the buttocks, trying to interest her in the activities of the book he is reading, Sex in the Married Life, she rises from the bed, as though she is at a garden party, and says "pleasantly", "'Shall I make some cocoa?' . . . 'And toast some sandwiches?'" There were these scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile and--this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack--not much voice (Bryant, 69).

Discussion and Analysis

But the silences of Maud Martha are also Brooks ' silences. The short vignetted chapters enact Maud Martha's silence. Ranging in length from one and a half pages to eighteen pages, these tightly controlled chapters withhold information about Maud just as she withholds her feelings; they leave her frozen in an arrested moment so that we are left without the reactions that are crucial to our understanding of her. With no continuity between one chapter and the next, the flow of Maud's life is checked just as powerfully as she checks her own anger. The short, declarative sentences, with few modifiers and little elaboration, are as stiff, unyielding and tight-lipped as Maud Martha herself.

An example of Brooks ' tendency to check Maud's activity (and thus her growth) is chapter five, ironically entitled, "you're being so good so ...