The House Girl and The Resurrectionist

ReadingTara Conklin's The House Girl and Matt Guinn's The Resurrectionist back-to-back turned out to be a slightly unsettling experience--as the two novels are, for all intents and purposes, the same book.  Both are parallel-plot historical novels featuring a beleaguered white professional in the present and a much-more beleaguered slave in the past.  In both, the slave is literate and possesses a unique talent (Josephine in The House Girl is an artist; Cudjo/Nemo in The Resurrectionist is an anatomist).  In both, the white professional (a lawyer and a disgraced medical resident) trawls the archives to uncover how the slave's talents have been appropriated and erased by the white establishment.  In both, the slave makes a break for freedom.  In both, the researcher discovers multiple lost ancestors (both theirs and someone else's).  And in both, the research project ultimately liberates the white professional from the grind of an oppressive institution, while belatedly restoring the once-lost slave's achievements to historical consciousness.  

Suzanne Keen has argued that "the romance of the archive arrives at something labelled truth, recovers lost or revealed knowledge, and reassures the reader with the promise of answers that can be located, despite the intervening obstructions and obfuscation."¹  The House Girl and The Resurrectionist are equally invested in giving historical comfort through the power of quasi-magical archives, which contain secrets guaranteed to disrupt the status quo, whether that of the art world (The House Girl, in which Josephine's talents have been mistakenly ascribed to her mistress) or of medicine (The Resurrectionist, in which the medical school turns out to be deeply imbricated in racism and old boy networks).  Of the two novels, The House Girl's archival adventures may be the more likely to cause experienced researchers to wince in non-recognition: Lina, our career-minded protagonist, has an uncanny knack for coming across letters that explain virtually everything, including Josephine's ultimately sad fate.  Jacob, Guinn's protagonist, winds up having some similar luck with a blackmail-worthy photograph, but he has virtually no access to Cudjo/Nemo outside of the medical school's financial records, course listings, and a couple of photographs, and the most satisfying aspects of his tale remain entirely unknown to him (albeit not the reader). In each case, though, the white protagonist's historical researches function in the plot as a sort of belated atonement, substituting historical agency in modern narratives (look! they did something!) for withheld freedoms (and much worse) in the past.  Even more disconcertingly, the primary beneficiary of this research is not the slave (for whom this all comes too late) or, necessarily, African-Americans (although Guinn at least gestures in that direction), but the crusading white protagonist: Lina liberates herself from the tyranny of "billable hours" and the implicitly misogynist culture of her prestigious law firm, while Jacob abandons his residency and regains his self-respect.  Neither character has a fixed destination at the end; instead, they luxuriate in the privilege of choice, of an open-ended future.  "She did not want six-minute increments and clients' whims to dictate how she spent her waking hours," Lina thinks; "she did not want to live a life ruled by reason" (366).   Lina's ability to choose uncertainty sits awkwardly next to the concluding chapter, which flashes back to Josephine, "walk[ing] steadily, with purpose" (369) toward what she believes to be a station on the Underground Railroad (but which the reader already knows is now a trap); the reader cannot help noting the discrepancy between what Lina's archival work accomplishes for Lina and what it accomplishes, or fails to accomplish, for the doomed Josephine.  For all that the narrative unfolds as a parallel plot, what primarily stands out is that the plots are not and cannot be parallel.  

Indeed, The House Girl's modern plot is oddly lacking in African-American characters, given its parallel slave plot.  The only two we encounter, Dresser (a high-flying executive who wants to launch an equally high-profile lawsuit demanding reparations for slavery) and Lina's coworker Garrison, inhabit a rarefied world of class privilege...and Garrison turns out to be a back-stabbing jerk into the bargain.  (We hear about a couple others, most notably a Sudanese refugee whom Lina once represented during her request for asylum, and whose primary plot function is to embody a worthier world of humanitarian action.)  Neither Lina nor the narrator ever spends much time reflecting on the plot's own segregation, and Lina herself appears to have little in the way of racial self-awareness.  By contrast, The Resurrectionist dwells more explicitly on the problematic relationship between the medical school and the local African-American community, carefully noting the workplace segregation (the doctors are almost all white; the manual laborers far more likely to be black) and Jacob's own unconscious prejudices.  That being said, Jacob's interactions with his housekeeper verge dangerously on the stereotypical, especially once he starts quizzing her for words of wisdom.   For Nemo, a far more ambiguous character than Josephine, snatches African-American bodies for dissection.  "Tell me something," Jacob finally asks, "why would he [Nemo] do that to his own people?" "What makes you think he had a choice?" Mary responds (236).  

Although Josephine's lack of "choice" primarily plays out around her lost child--born out of rape by the master, her son is concealed from her and given away to a neighboring plantation--Nemo's more overtly puts him at odds with the local slaves, who fear him and whom he often scorns.  The name, which he chooses for himself at his new owner's behest, simultaneously advertises his literacy and his nature as something of a Odysseus-like trickster; at the same time, as he thinks to himself, "[i]f not only his body and soul but his very name was at the behest of other men, why not become No Man?" (47).  Unlike Josephine, whose attempts to seize agency result in tragedy, Nemo actively seeks out opportunities to resist both the whites and black Christians--the former for obvious reasons, the latter for counseling peace and resignation instead of rebellion.  When Prince, a freed black preacher, confronts Nemo over his body-snatching, Nemo sneers that "[o]nly devil I know is white as a sheet, and yes, he walks around in the broad daylight.  I works for him and you works for him" (106).  (Prince's modern-day parallel, by contrast, breathes as much fire as Nemo would like.)  Nemo's attempts to negotiate and subvert his captivity range from the theatrical (his elegant clothes) to the secretive (serving a Confederate alcohol that has been used to preserve a baby's corpse); at the same time, he also runs up against the limits of his ability to work against the system from within, most horrifyingly when he must decide what to do with a "dead" prostitute who, it turns out, is not.  What does it mean to behave morally, the novel asks, if there is no choice? Unfortunately, The Resurrectionist soon slides over that troubling question, opting instead to let Nemo triumph in spectacularly Shawshank Redemption-ish fashion while, in the present, Jacob overcomes the almost parodically Old-Boyish network at the medical school and engineers his own moral victory.  The ending is very Hollywood.  

¹ Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 43.