Week 6, entry one

10/5 from “The Closing Door”

What does Lewis mean when he calls Grimke “a true aristocrat of color”? Does this title have anything to do with the metaphor of the closing door?

Grimke’s aristocratic stature developed from her use of a high form of fiction to comment on the current social realities. In a previous post I attempted to draw some similarities between Grimke’s work and Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” I feel the connections are warranted and reasonable, and based on that I think Grimke’s use of this high form of fiction helps cast her as a true aristocrat of color. Grimke’s work appears in the first stage of the Harlem Renaissance, when white Bohemia was fascinated with the savage black person while simultaneously the black artists of the time were responding to the Red Summer with poems such as “If We Must Die” and Grimke’s short story. Lewis writes, “For the whites, art was the means to change society before they would accept it. For the blacks, art was the means to change society in order to be accepted into it” (xxi). The assumption in these beliefs is that art must foremost have some political dimension, and that would seemingly be an aristocratic belief because the higher class for the most part consumes the works of literature that combine language and other literary tools to comment on social realities.

By writing “The Closing Door” Grimke is entering into that aristocratic circle by using a high form of fiction developed by one of the original American masters to comment about race. The central horror to the story, the infantcide, reflects Lewis’ line about blacks understanding of art—they must change society in order to be accepted into it. When Agnes Milton realizes society will not change to embrace her race, she supposes the best option is to kill her child rather than letting the child mature into just another “instrument.” Her decision is contained in the multi-dimensional symbol of the closing door, Lewis points out, whether it represents the isolation, the depression, or in the larger picture, the loss of opportunities for blacks across America suffered during the violent Red Summer of 1919 (486).