Tainted Constructions

Abstract Chapter 11, “Tainted Constructions: Great Houses in Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich,” discusses the two texts that first inspired this study: early twenty-first-century historical fictions by the preeminent contemporary African and Native American women novelists that dramatize the exploitation involved in the building of grand American mansions in the North, rather than the South. Neither A Mercy (2008) nor Four Souls (2004) is told from the point of view of the white men who built the houses—one who brazenly exploits young Native women to steal their land for timber, and another, kinder man corrupted by the lure of slavery’s profit. Instead, both novels stage the building of the great house so as to voice the elemental rage of the built upon. Exemplifying the tradition of opposition to great American literary houses, the compelling storytellers Florens and Nanapush narrate parables about houses self-cursed by their construction on the lives of the disempowered, from enslaved, starved, and exploited people to animals, trees, and other elements of nature. In high contrast to all the English novels named after or identified with their great houses, these novels actually accuse their inset houses of murder, staging a face-off between imaginative writing and hegemony’s mansion.