Paule Marshall’s Brown Girls

This chapter focuses on Paule Marshall’s characterization of Black upward mobility in the semiautobiographical novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). While the main characters of mother and daughter are often opposed in terms of their orientation toward the American dream, this analysis draws them together in a chiasmus of character shaped by their shared experience of racism. The Brooklyn brownstone emblematizes the difficult succession of European and non-European immigrants, and Barbadian immigrants in particular, reorienting readers toward a structural critique. Shaped not just by individual will but by determinative social forces, the spectacular figure of self making is brought into focus as a constrained character to be integrated rather than disavowed.