THESIS ABSTRACT

Roger L. Noyes

"Orneriness": Subversive Compliance Methodologies From Plantation Places to Plantation Spaces in African-American Literature.

There is a distinct legacy in literature that can be traced through the novels of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ernest J. Gaines, and David Bradley, to which Charles Chesnutt (author of The Conjure Woman) is the primary forbear. This behavioral legacy, which Bradley calls "orneriness" in his 1981 novel The Chaneysville Incident, is one that idealizes the subversive compliance of black characters' reactions to hostile social environments. Subversion is shown as behavior that complies to social codes while at the same time undermining the presumed purposes of these codes.

What has made "orneriness," or subversive compliance, an enduring methodology is its transmittance across genealogical distances. This genealogical transmittance also suggests the phenomenon of place and space, or the uninterrupted transference of social codes from the actual plantation, or the plantation place, to contemporary versions of the plantation, or plantation spaces. The purpose of my thesis is to identify the ways in which these modes of "subversive compliance" are demonstrated in African- American fiction throughout these shifts from place and space, according to the Chesnuttian tradition.