Spyin' noble: Money in novels by Black American women

Within the African-American literary tradition, critical discussion of the complex interrelatedness of the three premiere subjectivities--race, gender, class--has treated "class" rather negligibly. In particular, Black feminist criticism, concentrating primarily on restoring and dilating Black female subjectivity, circumvents some pivotal questions, especially in regard to the interworkings of class and gender. This dissertation, an investigation of the textual fusions of class, race, and gender, attempts to excavate and spotlight a critical but overlooked component of social class positioning, namely money.;The question, "Who's funding who?," subsidizes the entire project. It is an enterprise arising out of Houston Baker's bottom-line observation that Janie Crawford's blues story for Eatonville's consumption is made possible, financed by, bourgeois economics. Detonating the long-standing bipolarity of African-American blues and the bourgeoisie, Baker's capital reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, unearths a line of inquiry appropriate to contemporary novels by Black women: Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye; and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow. The threads that bind these novels are their thematization of class subjectivity within the African-American community; like socio-historical contexts; and, an authorial sensibility of the functionality of the literary product.;The study examines the class politics of these works and the way in which economically privileged Black American female experience figures in novels by Black women. I explore Black women writers' representation of the Black woman's role in American capitalism and, in particular, their depiction of Black woman's relation to money and money's relation to personal agency. Revising conventional class analyses, the project considers the ways in which money functions or fails to function in the lives of fictional Black American women.