Ideology and the individual in novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty

An analysis of four novels reveals their common concern for the complex relationship between cultural ideology and the individual consciousness. Despite the writers' differences--race, ethnicity, gender, and region--the American experiences they portray have fundamental similarities. All invite readers to revise their notions of the individual as "self-reliant" and society as value-neutral and impersonal. Each writer depicts a society informed by a network of assumptions I call the ideology of domination, the belief in the authority and legitimacy of domineering behavior. This ideology underlines individualism, the assumption that individuals earn happiness through competition with others. Individualism ignores material conditions that give one person leverage over another and glorifies such positions of dominance as inherently meaningful and beneficial. Defining America as a meritocracy thus redefines injuries caused by racism, sexism, and economic inequity as consequences that individuals have earned. Ellison's protagonist's individualism proves unreliable as his adventures expose material and cultural obstacles to self-reliance, especially for African-Americans. For most of Invisible Man cultural ideology permeates his consciousness, preventing him from hearing the multiple voices of dissent Ellison presents to readers through characters and textual allusions. Ideology damages all of The Bluest Eye's characters, teaching them to internalize racism and aggression. However, characters also experience impulses distinct from the desire to dominate. These desires for love and creative work, devalued by their culture, lead some characters to satisfaction and interdependence. Seize the Day depicts a less marginalized American, yet also inscribes a cultural critique in its story of his comically frantic attempts to achieve the capitalist American dream of financial success. The Optimist's Daughter similarly critiques individualism, revealing the town's social hierachy to be a source of anxiety for all its inhabitants, even those "self-reliant" enough to attempt to retreat from it into a loving family enclave. In each novel, ideology distorts reality, preventing characters from recognizing that their worlds contain inherent goodness which their actions can harvest and enhance. Circumstances bring each protagonist to a better understanding of the destructive nature of ideology and of their own power to rely instead upon their non-domineering impulses and to enact praxis: creative, nurturing, collective life.