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

Siobhan Somervilles essay Passing through the confine in Pauline E. Hopkinss Contending ForcesIn Siobhan Somervilles essay, Passing through the Closet in Pauline E. Hopkinss Contending Forces, the tacit allusion to homosexuality deep down Hopkins story is argued to be a resource used to question the dominance or unsaid strength of heterosexuality in the African-American community over Black women. While I do believe Hopkins may have intended for the impertinent to raise questions about the institution of marriage in relation to the African-American female, I do not believe the argument is as polarized as a difference between homosexual and heterosexual attraction in relation to politics between the sexes. Instead, I would argue that the very 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 all important(p) piece of textual evidence in Somervilles argument is the attic tantrum between Dora and Sappho. In this scene Sappho begs Dora to spend 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 apartment 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 clear 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 Life North and South. New York Oxford Univers ity Press, 1988.Levi-Strauss, Claude. The basal 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 Columbia University Press, 1985.Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. The Female World of extol 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