“Jack Boughton has a Wife and a Child”: Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home

Abstract

Robinson focuses the action of Gilead and Home in the small town of Gilead during the Civil Rights Era even as she relegates black history and black voices to her novels' peripheries. Blackness nonetheless lurks and frays at the edges of both narratives, at the edges of memory, remaining simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible in both John Ames's and Glory Boughton's remembering of the past. In this essay, I use Robinson's companion novels to illuminate the ways in which American society's representation of black bodies and subjectivities makes possible ways of remembering and retelling Blackness that affirm kinship between white fathers and sons and make lineage transpire between them. Robinson is not blameless of this representational strategy. She is attentive to the ways in which and the reasons why Blackness is made absent in the town of Gilead; she does not address, however, how she also utilizes that absent presence to affix genealogy to Jack and Ames, or even Jack and his biological father, but never Jack and his son.

“In the Way of the Gift”: The Postsecular Conditions of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

“…9 For Horton, this aesthetic revitalization "is not fully tethered to doctrinal objects of belief, nor is it entirely a subjective, self-reflexive performance of belief" (ibid.) Instead, it renews "attention to 7 Pak (2015) and Andujo (2019) both draw on Douglas' (2011) argument that race in Gilead is a "serviceable presence." For Pak, what is missing in the narrative, namely, Christian complicity in slavery, serves to reinforce white genealogies.…”