Jones, Gayl 1949-

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JONES, Gayl 1949-

PERSONAL: Born November 23, 1949, in Lexington, KY; daughter of Franklin (a cook) and Lucille (Wilson) Jones; married Bob Higgins, who later took the name Bob Jones (deceased). Education: Connecticut College, B.A., 1971; Brown University, M.A., 1973, D.A., 1975.

ADDRESSES: Home—Lexington, KY. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108.

CAREER: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1975-83, began as assistant professor, became professor of English; writer.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, Authors League of America.

AWARDS, HONORS: Award for best original production in the New England region, American College Theatre Festival, 1973, for Chile Woman; grants from Shubert Foundation, 1973-74, Southern Fellowship Foundation, 1973-75, and Rhode Island Council on the Arts, 1974-75; fellowships from Yaddo, 1974, National Endowment of the Arts, 1976, and Michigan Society of Fellows, 1977-79; award from Howard Foundation, 1975; Fiction Award from Mademoiselle, 1975; Henry Russell Award, University of Michigan, 1981.

WRITINGS:

Chile Woman (play), Shubert Foundation (New York, NY), 1974.

Corregidora (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1975.

Eva's Man (novel), Random House (New York, NY), 1976.

White Rat (short stories), Random House (New York, NY), 1977.

Song for Anninho (poetry), Lotus Press (Detroit, MI), 1981.

The Hermit-Woman (poetry), Lotus Press (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Xarque and Other Poems, Lotus Press (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (criticism), Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1991.

The Healing (novel), Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1998.

Mosquito (novel), Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1999.

Contributor to anthologies, including Confirmation, 1983, Chants of Saints, Keeping the Faith, Midnight Birds, and Soulscript. Contributor to periodicals, including Massachusetts Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Research on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Brazil and on settlements of escaped slaves, such as Palmares.

SIDELIGHTS: Gayl Jones's novels Corregidora and Eva's Man, in addition to many of the stories in her collection White Rat, offer stark, often brutal accounts of black women whose psyches reflect the ravages of accumulated sexual and racial exploitation. In Corregidora Jones reveals the tormented life of a woman whose female forebears—at the hands of one man—endured a cycle of slavery, prostitution, and incest over three generations. Eva's Man explores the deranged mind of a woman institutionalized for poisoning and sexually mutilating a male acquaintance. And in "Asylum," a story from White Rat, a young woman is confined to a mental hospital for a series of bizarre actions that, in her mind, protests a society she sees as bent on her personal violation. "The abuse of women and its psychological results fascinate Gayl Jones, who uses these recurring themes to magnify the absurdity and the obscenity of racism and sexism in everyday life," commented Jerry W. Ward, Jr., in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. "Her novels and short fictions invite readers to explore the interior of caged personalities, men and women driven to extremes." Keith Byerman elaborated in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.: "Jones creates worlds radically different from those of 'normal' experience and of storytelling convention. Her tales are gothic in the sense of dealing with madness, sexuality, and violence, but they do not follow in the Edgar Allan Poe tradition of focusing on private obsession and irrationality. Though her narrators are close to if not over the boundaries of sanity, the experiences they record reveal clearly that society acts out its own obsessions often violently."

Corregidora, Jones's first novel, explores the psychological effects of slavery and sexual abuse on a modern black woman. Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer from Kentucky, descends from a line of women who are the progeny, by incest, of a Portuguese slaveholder named Corregidora—the father of both Ursa's mother and grandmother. "All of the women, including the great-granddaughter Ursa, keep the name Corregidora as a reminder of the depredations of the slave system and of the rapacious natures of men," Byerman explained in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. "The story is passed from generation to generation of women, along with the admonition to 'produce generations' to keep alive the tale of evil." Partly as a result of this history, Ursa becomes involved in abusive relationships with men. The novel itself springs from an incident of violence; after being thrown down a flight of stairs by her first husband and physically injured so that she cannot bear children, Ursa "discharges her obligation to the memory of Corregidora by speaking [the] book," noted John Updike in the New Yorker. The novel emerges as Ursa's struggle to reconcile her heritage with her present life. Corregidora "persuasively fuses black history, or the mythic consciousness that must do for black history, with the emotional nuances of contemporary black life," Updike continued. "The book's innermost action . . . is Ursa's attempt to transcend a nightmare black consciousness and waken to her own female, maimed humanity."

Corregidora was described as a novel of unusual power and impact. "No black American novel since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940," wrote Ivan Webster in Time, "has so skillfully traced psychic wounds to a sexual source." Darryl Pinckney in New Republic called Corregidora "a small, fiercely concentrated story, harsh and perfectly told. . . . Original, superbly imagined, nothing about the book was simple or easily digested. Out of the worn themes of miscegenation and diminishment, Gayl Jones excavated the disturbingly buried damage of racism." Critics particularly noted Jones's treatment of sexual detail and its illumination of the central character. "One of the book's merits," according to Updike, "is the ease with which it assumes the writer's right to sexual specifics, and its willingness to explore exactly how our sexual and emotional behavior is warped within the matrix of family and race." In the book's final scene, Ursa comes to a reconciliation with her first husband, Mutt, by envisioning an ambivalent sexual relationship between her great-grandmother and the slavemaster Corregidora. Corregidora is a novel "filled with sexual and spiritual pain," wrote Margo Jefferson in Newsweek; "hatred, love and desire wear the same face, and humor is blues-bitter. . . . Jones's language is subtle and sinewy, and her imagination sure."

Jones's second novel, Eva's Man, continues her exploration into the psychological effects of brutality, yet presents a character who suffers greater devastation. Eva Medina Canada, incarcerated for the murder and mutilation of a male acquaintance, narrates a personal history that depicts the damaging influences of a sexually aggressive and hostile society. Updike described the exploitative world that has shaped the mentally deranged Eva: "Evil permeates the erotic education of Eva Canada, as it progresses from Popsicle-stick violations to the witnessing of her mother's adultery and a growing awareness of the whores and 'queen bees' in the slum world around her, and on to her own reluctant initiation through encounters in buses and in bars, where a man with no thumb monotonously propositions her. The evil that emanates from men becomes hers." In a narrative that is fragmented and disjointed, Eva gives no concrete motive for the crime committed; furthermore, she neither shows remorse nor any signs of rehabilitation. More experimental than Corregidora, Eva's Man displays "a sharpened starkness, a power of ellipsis that leaves ever darker gaps between its flashes of rhythmic, sensuously exact dialogue and visible symbol," according to Updike. John Leonard added in the New York Times that "not a word is wasted" in Eva's narrative. "It seems, in fact, as if Eva doesn't have enough words, as if she were trying to use the words she has to make a poem, a semblance of order, and fails of insufficiency." Leonard concluded that "Eva's Man may be one of the most unpleasant novels of the season. It is also one of the most accomplished."

Eva's Man was praised for its emotional impact, yet some reviewers found the character of Eva extreme or inaccessible. June Jordan in the New York Times Book Review called Eva's Man "the blues that lost control. This is the rhythmic, monotone lamentation of one woman, Eva Medina, who is nobody I have ever known." Jordan explained that "Jones delivers her story in a strictly controlled, circular form that is wrapped, around and around with ambivalence. Unerringly, her writing creates the tension of a problem unresolved." In the end, however, Jordan found that the fragmented details of Eva's story "do not mesh into illumination." On the other hand, some reviewers regard the gaps in Eva's Man as appropriate and integral to its meaning. Pinckney called the novel "a tale of madness; one exacerbated if not caused by frustration, accumulated grievances" and commented on aspects that contribute to this effect: "Structurally unsettled, more scattered than Corregidora, Eva's Man is extremely remote, more troubling in its hallucinations. . . . The personal exploitation that causes Eva's desperation is hard to appreciate. Her rage seems never to find its proper object, except, possibly, in her last extreme act." Updike likewise held that the novel accurately portrays Eva's deranged state, yet he points out that Jones's characterization skills are not at their peak. "Jones apparently wishes to show us a female heart frozen into rage by deprivation, but the worry arises, as it did not in Corregidora, that the characters are dehumanized as much by her artistic vision as by their circumstances."

Jordan raised a concern that the inconclusiveness of Eva's Man harbors a potentially damaging feature. "There is the very real, upsetting accomplishment of Gayl Jones in this, her second novel: sinister misinformation about women—about women, in general, about black women in particular." Jones commented in Black Women Writers (1950-1980) on the predicament faced in portraying negative characters: "To deal with such a character as Eva becomes problematic in the way that 'Trueblood' becomes problematic in [Ralph Ellison's] Invisible Man. It raises the questions of possibility. Should a Black writer ignore such characters, refuse to enter 'such territory' because of the 'negative image' and because such characters can be misused politically by others, or should one try to reclaim such complex, contradictory characters as well as try to reclaim the idea of the 'heroic image'?" Jones elaborated in an interview with Claudia Tate for Black Women Writers at Work: "'Positive race images' are fine as long as they're very complex and interesting personalities. Right now I'm not sure how to reconcile the various things that interest me with 'positive race images.' It's important to be able to work with a range of personalities, as well as with a range within one personality. For instance, how would one reconcile an interest in neurosis or insanity with positive race image?"

Although Jones's subject matter is often charged and intense, a number of critics have praised a particular restraint she manages in her narratives. Regarding Corregidora, Updike remarked, "Our retrospective impression of Corregidora is of a big territory—the Afro-American psyche—rather thinly and stabbingly populated by ideas personae, hints. Yet that such a small book could seem so big speaks well for the generous spirit of the author, unpolemical where there has been much polemic, exploratory where rhetoric and outrage tend to block the path." Similarly, Jones maintains an authorial distance in her fiction which, in turn, makes for believable and gripping characters. Byerman commented, "The authority of [Jones's] depiction of the world is enhanced by [her] refusal to intrude upon or judge her narrators. She remains outside the story, leaving the reader with none of the usual markers of a narrator's reliability. She gives these characters the speech of their religion, which, by locating them in time and space, makes it even more difficult to easily dismiss them; the way they speak has authenticity, which carries over to what they tell. The results are profoundly disturbing tales of repression, manipulation, and suffering."

Reviewers have also noted Jones's ability to innovatively incorporate Afro-American speech patterns into her work. In Black Women Writers (1950-1980), Melvin Dixon noted that "Gayl Jones has figured among the best of contemporary Afro-American writers who have used Black speech as a major aesthetic device in their works. Like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sherley Williams, Toni Cade Bambara, and such male writers as Ernest Gaines and Ishmael Reed, Jones uses the rhythm and structure of spoken language to develop authentic characters and to establish new possibilities for dramatic conflict within the text and between readers and the text itself." In her interview with Tate, Jones remarked on the importance of storytelling traditions to her work: "At the time I was writing Corregidora and Eva's Man I was particularly interested—and continue to be interested—in oral traditions of storytelling—Afro-American and others, in which there is always the consciousness and importance of the hearer, even in the interior monologues where the storyteller becomes her own hearer. That consciousness or self-consciousness actually determines my selection of significant events."

In 1977 Jones published a collection of short stories, White Rat. A number of critics noted the presence of Jones's typical thematic concerns, yet also felt that her shorter fiction did not allow enough room for character development. Diane Johnson commented in the New York Review of Books that the stories in White Rat "were written in some cases earlier than her novels, so they confirm one's sense of her direction and preoccupations: sex is violation, and violence is the principal dynamic of human relationships." Mel Watkins wrote about Jones's short fiction in the New York Times: "The focus throughout is on desolate, forsaken characters struggling to exact some snippet of gratification from their lives. . . . Although her prose here is as starkly arresting and indelible as in her novels, except for the longer stories such as 'Jeveta' and 'The Women,' these tales are simply doleful vignettes—slices of life so beveled that they seem distorted."

While Jones's writing often emphasizes a tormented side of life—especially regarding male-female relationships—it also raises the possibility for more positive interactions. Jones pointed out in the Tate interview that "there seems to be a growing understanding—working itself out especially in Corregidora—of what is required in order to be genuinely tender. Perhaps brutality enables one to recognize what tenderness is." Some critics have found ambivalence at the core of Jones's fiction. Dixon wrote that "Redemption . . . is most likely to occur when the resolution of conflict is forged in the same vocabulary as the tensions which precipitated it. This dual nature of language makes it appear brutally indifferent, for it contains the source and the resolution of conflicts. . . . What Jones is after is the words and deeds that finally break the sexual bondage men and women impose upon each other."

In 1991, Jones published her first book of literary criticism, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Here Jones argues that all literatures, not just African-American, develop in relation to and must come to terms with their own culture's oral storytelling practices. With this point in mind, she compares the poetry, short fiction, and novels of African-American authors—including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison—with the works of longstanding canonical authors from a wide variety of historical eras and cultures, from Chaucer and Cervantes to Joyce. M. Giulia Fabi, in American Literature, called this a "daring and insightful study."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 37, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2003.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 6, 1976, Volume 9, 1978.

Contemporary Novelists, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Coser, Stelamaris, Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paula Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers after 1955, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1984.

Evans, Mari, editor, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Anchor Press/Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1984.

Robinson, Sally, Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1991.

Tate, Claudia, editor, Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum (New York, NY), 1986.

PERIODICALS

African American Review, winter, 1994, p. 559; spring, 1994, p. 141; summer, 1994, p. 223; summer, 2000, Candice M. Jenkins, review of The Healing, p. 365, Laurie Champion, review of Mosquito, p. 366.

American Literature, June, 1993.

Artforum International, March, 1998, Jacqueline Woodson, review of The Healing, p. S24.

Belles Lettres, summer, 1992.

Black World, February, 1976.

Book World, February 22, 1987.

Canadian Literature, winter, 1992.

Choice, November, 1991.

College Literature, February, 1992.

Comparative Literature Studies, summer, 1999, Bernard W. Bell, reviews of Liberating Voices: Oral Traditions in African American Literature and The Healing, p. 247.

Esquire, December, 1976.

Guardian, November 16, 1998, Michael Ellison, review of The Healing, p. T8.

Journal of American Folklore, winter, 1993.

Kliatt, spring, 1986.

Library Journal, January, 1999, Eleanor J. Bader, review of Mosquito, p. 152.

Literary Quarterly, May 15, 1975.

Massachusetts Review, winter, 1977.

Michigan Quarterly Review, spring, 2001, Arlene R. Keizer, review of Mosquito, p. 431.

Modern Fiction Studies, fall, 1993, p. 825.

Nation, May 25, 1998, Jill Nelson, review of The Healing, p. 30.

National Review, April 14, 1978.

New Republic, June 28, 1975; June 19, 1976.

Newsweek, May 19, 1975; April 12, 1976.

New Yorker, August 18, 1975; August 9, 1976.

New York Review of Books, November 10, 1977.

New York Times, April 30, 1976; December 28, 1977.

New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1975; May 16, 1976; March 15, 1987; May 10, 1998, Valerie Sayers, review of The Healing, p. 28.

Publishers Weekly, November 23, 1998, review of Mosquito, p. 57.

Time, June 16, 1975.

Times (London, England), April 1, 2000, Scott Bradfield, review of The Healing, p. 22, February 8, 1999, Tamala M. Edwards, review of Mosquito, p. 72.

Washington Post, October 21, 1977.

Women's Review of Books, March, 1998, Judith Grossman, review of The Healing, p. 15, March, 1999, Deborah McDowell, review of Mosquito, p. 9.

Yale Review, autumn, 1976.