Book Review: Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy by Candice M. Jenkins

Candice M. Jenkins’ Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy is a timely analysis of the public and private faces of Black intimacy. The text takes aim at the persistent themes of sexual respectability, or the lack thereof, in twentieth-century African–American women’s literature. Jenkins argues that contrary to popular belief, preoccupation with issues of respectability, sexuality, and Blackness have not waned since the close of the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, narratives fraught with anxiety around Black sexual propriety have continued to be written, aided and abetted by the coupling of a general American/Western fear of intimacy with a particularly insidious distrust of Black sexual politics. However, unlike their Victorian counterparts, recent Black women writers critique the very fixation with propriety, underscoring how this anxiety actually reifies the structures of dominations African–Americans are attempting to dismantle.

Jenkins cites two main ideologies. First, she invokes both Frances Beal’s ‘‘double jeopardy’’ and Du Bois’ ‘‘double consciousness’’ in coining the phrase ‘‘doubled vulnerability.’’ She argues that Blacks suffer not only from the fear of intimacy that all human beings share, but also suffer from a vulnerability specific to their existence as Blacks in a world where Black bodies are already marked as overexposed and aberrant. It is this doubled vulnerability that informs the guiding paradigm of Private Lives, Proper Relations: the salvific wish, a response to the so-called pathology of Blackness, whereby Black women, in particular, embrace traditional bourgeois standards of propriety in an effort to counteract accusations of immorality and sexual deviance. The salvific wish is not an individualist impulse; although Black women are the primary sacrificial lambs, their bodies are offered up for communal salvation in the face of the ongoing ravages of racism, classism, and sexism.

Jenkins’ analyses are thorough and innovative. Moreover, she does not enforce a ‘‘one-size-fits-all’’ approach with the concept of the salvific wish. Instead, she skillfully illustrates the complex ways in which authors from the Harlem Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century expose the fallacy of bourgeois propriety as a safe haven from which Blacks can combat oppression. For example, in her reading of Anne Petry’s The Street, Jenkins throws a seemingly inconsequential portion of the novel’s plot—Lutie’s decision to move onto the eponymous street—into sharp relief. For Jenkins, Lutie’s impetus to move indicates a larger desire not for independence, as critics often contend, but rather for a measure of respectability. Lutie’s move away from the seedy atmosphere of her father’s apartment and the influence of his promiscuous girlfriend Lil marks her as a subject invested in the trappings of the salvific wish. Lutie ignores the dangers of the street and the surrounding ghetto in favor of the ideological safety she accesses in her escape from her father’s home. In addition to cogent close readings, Jenkins does a stellar job of linking public policy, such as the infamous Moynihan report and the more recent Census debate around the racial category of ‘‘multicultural,’’ to the literature, skillfully illuminating the mutual influence one has on the other.

Chapter four, ‘‘Intimate Borders,’’ is the most realized chapter of the text. Jenkins convincingly argues that Toni Morrison’s Paradise critiques discourses of Black nationalism and authenticity, rather than simply reacting to America’s Puritan roots as a ‘‘City on a Hill.’’ She calls for a nuanced reading of the seemingly reverse colorism at the heart of the novel. Jenkins recognizes the vilification of fair-skinned Blacks is linked to a particular patriarchal class construct that, in particular, accepts and even favors light skin only when it is connected to men’s wealth and power. Thus, the ‘‘creamy’’ skin of the ‘‘nineteen Negro ladies’’ are highly esteemed and even eroticized, in contrast to the denigration of light-skinned women in Ruby. The latter are unconnected women who do not benefit from family ties and, most importantly, male protection. Jenkins’ reading of the overlooked nuances of the text is powerfully persuasive and a long overdue intervention.

Private Lives, Proper Relations is primarily a literary analysis, tracing the trajectory of Black women’s writing about sexuality and intimacy in the twentieth century. However, unlike some recent works of literary criticism, Jenkins does not downplay the relevance of literary analysis to the actual lived experiences of Black people, but argues instead that ‘‘African American fiction participates in and speaks back to larger cultural narratives that are constitutive [author’s emphasis] of black subjectivity in the United States’’ (24). Jenkins successfully articulates the greater good of her epistemology over the course of Private Lives, Proper Relations. Indeed, in the text’s epilogue, Jenkins offers solutions to the ongoing issue of doubled vulnerability. The book’s main suggestion is, beginning in the symbolic sense, to dismantle the hegemony of heteronormativity. That is, by queering conceptions of what it means to be a Black person of any sexual orientation, Jenkins argues that the limiting and exclusionary practices of heteronormative society would be avoided. The result is a refreshing take on the genre of literary analysis.

The text often suffers from repetition. Jenkins, in an effort to ground the reader in the terms she has created, sometimes bogs the reader down in a superfluity of explanation. The salvific wish, for example, is explained, in detail, in every chapter, almost using the same words. While the redundancy does not overwhelmingly detract from the text’s usefulness, it was at times marked as clumsily constructed. Overall, however, the text provides a much needed intervention and expansion of knowledge. Jenkins’ conceptualization of the salvific wish will undoubtedly challenge the field into more nuanced assessments of Black subjectivities, assessments as nuanced as Black fiction itself. Indeed, Private Lives, Proper Relations ends with a meditation of the lack of the salvific wish in contemporary Black popular fiction. Perhaps this will prompt more scholars of African–American literature and cultural studies to focus on not only why we create our myths, but also where we place them.