Costuming Language: Dialect, Whiteness, and Power in Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow

Résumé fourni par la source

This study analyses the debut novel of Frank Yerby, The Foxes of Harrow (1946), by focusing on the dialect and linguistic politics, and placing the novel within broader discussions on linguistic purity, race, and cultural hegemony of the nineteenth century. Despite Yerby being currently one of the most commercially successful African American novelists of the twentieth century, there is an exceptionally narrow spectrum of critical interest in his fictional work. Based on the historical background of the Gilded Age, which saw an influx of anxieties about dialect and linguistic contamination with the ebb and flow of immigrant influx and the introduction of cultural pluralism, the present research posits that Yerby uses dialect as a strategic tool of resistance against the demand to have a standardized and cultivated American language. Yerby challenges the perceived notions of whiteness through the portrayal of Irish, Creole, and Black voices, clarifying the role of language as an indicator of privilege and an institutionalized place of exclusion at the same time. At the heart of the analysis is Stephen Fox, an Irish immigrant who finds himself in the exclusive social life of Louisiana with the power of standard English and with a destiny that is exacerbated by the fact that the novel deals with Creole hybridity and the deliberately silenced voices of the enslaved characters. By disrupting language hierarchies and causing the ultimate downfall of the Stephen plantation dynasty, Yerby destabilizes the dominant ideology of cultural homogeneity and repositions whiteness itself as a performance and essentially contested identity.

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