Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Éva Miklódy: Redefining the "Other ": Race, Gender, Class, and Violence in Gloria Nay lor's Bailey's Café
Miss Maple, given to him by Eve after she starts to employ him as her housekeeper and bouncer of her boardinghouse. Miss Maple, true to his name, also wears a dress and sandals when doubling as housekeeper. Eve, whose origins are unknown, since it was her Godfather who found her "in a patch of ragweed, so new [she] was still tied to the birth sac" (83), generates a sexless identity when, escaping from her Godfather's tyranny, she emerges from the Lousiana mud: "I had no choice but walk into New Orleans neither male nor female —mud. But I had right then and there choose what I was going to be when I walked back home" (91). For both Stanley and Eve their manipulation with their sexual identity is a self-liberating and self-defensive act. Stanley liberates himself from his painful memories of the torments of his job search. He is not only capable of coping with his situation in his assumed identity as a woman, but this also expresses that his mental and physical suffering is commensurate with the suffering of women who have the capacity to bear it better than men. Bailey observes right at the beginning of the book that "a woman can drag the whole thing out —over years —and pick, pick, pick to death" (5). For Eve, relinquishing her sex, makes it possible for her to become everybody's mother, and thus to start her boardinghouse into which she takes women who are in need of both mental and physical recovery. She is a redemptive figure who is even able to assume supernatural power and use magic and conjure for healing. By changing Stanley into a woman and Eve into a sexless person, Naylor has also been able to give evidence of the fact that the "other" is not necessarily a gender-specific category. Naylor also allows her characters a relatively large degree of class mobility and, by doing so, she suggests that the notion of the "other" is not determined by belonging to a particular social class either. Jesse Bell from the Manhattan docks marries into a rich middle-class black family, which does not change the contemptuous attitude of Uncle Eli toward her and her family. Stanley's well-to-do, middle-class background calls for hate and humiliation from the poor and uneducated Gatlin boys. These examples offered by Naylor's novel show that "the other" is a larger and more flexible category than has been interpreted and employed by black feminist critics and than is represented in The 61
