Eva's Man by Gayl Jones
**Overview of "Eva's Man" by Gayl Jones**
"Eva's Man" is a thought-provoking second novel by Gayl Jones that explores themes of repression, manipulation, and suffering through the lens of a black woman's psychological turmoil. The story is narrated by Eva Medina Canada, who recounts her life from within a prison asylum after committing a violent act against her lover. The novel delves into the impacts of male violence on women's lives, highlighting how such experiences shape Eva's identity and choices.
As she reflects on her past, Eva shares a series of disturbing encounters with men, including sexual initiation, domestic abuse, and exploitation, which illustrate the objectification women often endure. The narrative is unstructured, featuring flashbacks, dreams, and dialogues with her cellmate, Elvira, but notably omits clear motives for Eva's violent actions. The story draws parallels between Eva and the archetype of the femme fatale, suggesting a deep-seated fatalism surrounding women's fates in a patriarchal society.
Through its first-person perspective, the novel invites readers to confront the complexities of female sexuality and the psychological scars left by systemic male dominance. "Eva's Man" is both a gothic tale of madness and a profound commentary on the intersections of gender and power dynamics, making it a compelling read for those interested in feminist literature and psychological narratives.
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Subject Terms
Eva's Man by Gayl Jones
First published: 1976
The Work
Eva’s Man, Gayl Jones’s provocative second novel, is a psychological tale of repression, manipulation, and suffering. It is a gothic story of madness—Eva’s madness—and the psychological effects of violence on black women. From her prison asylum room, where she has been incarcerated for five years for poisoning, then castrating, her lover, Eva Medina Canada, the psychotic title character, narrates the events which led up to her bizarre and violent act. Although she has maintained a steadfast and defiant silence in response to the grinding interrogation of the male judicial authorities—the police and psychiatrists—Eva readily tells her story to the reader. Through time and space intrusions, many flashbacks and a combination of dreams, fantasies, memories, interrogation, and exchanges between herself and her cellmate, Elvira, Eva tells everything except her motive.
In the unsequential narrative, Eva’s story delineates unequivocally men’s malevolence and women’s natural acceptance of a destiny inevitably circumscribed by this malevolence. Eva’s appropriating of and identification with the story of Queen Bee, the femme fatale whose love, like a deadly sting, kills off every man with whom she falls in love, suggests that women resign themselves to a female destiny. This horrid fatalism blames and punishes women for their sexuality. Paradoxically, since the drone is always at the service of the queen bee, it is women who have power to affirm or deny manhood. Aligning herself with the queen bee, Eva kills Davis, the drone, rather than submit to his excessive domination.
For Eva the lessons in the violent consequences of womanhood and female sexuality began early. Prepubescent Freddy, a neighbor boy, initiates her sexually with a dirty Popsicle stick. Her mother’s lover, Tyrone, makes her feel him. She sees her father punish her mother’s infidelity with rape. Cousin Alphonse solicits sex from her, and a thumbless man harasses her sexually. Moses Tribbs propositions her, thereby provoking her attack on him with a pocket knife. Her fifty-five-year-old husband James, out of jealousy, disallows a telephone in the house. Finally, Davis, her lover, imprisons and uses her for five days. To each of these men, Eva (like other women characters in the novel, including her mother) exists merely as an object to satisfy insatiable male sexual needs. In response to this objectification and violence by men, Eva remains steadfastly silent, choosing neither to explain her extreme action nor to defend herself.
Apart from the bizarreness of Eva’s brutal act, which delineates the level of her madness, it is perhaps the exclusive use of the first-person narrative voice and the lack of authorial intrusion or questioning of Eva’s viewpoint that make Eva’s Man controversial and successful.
Bibliography
Barksdale, Richard K. “Castration Symbolism in Recent Black American Fiction.” College Language Association Journal 29, no. 4 (1986): 400-413. Considers Eva’s Man an example of fiction depicting men whose sexual insensitivity and violence merit their castration. Eva’s crime is not against Davis Carter specifically but against all black men who have helped to create the sexual world in which women such as Eva and her predecessors have had to live.
Basu, Biman. “Public and Private Discourses and the Black Female Subject: Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man.” Callaloo 19 (Winter, 1996): 193-208. Basu notes that Jones has been criticized for reinforcing sexual and class stereotypes in her novel, and that her female protagonist is too passive in the face of abuse. Yet Jones has reiterated that her goal was to present a female character whose subjectivity in the story is indeterminate.
Byerman, Keith. “Black Vortex: The Gothic Structure of Eva’s Man.” MELUS 7, no. 4 (1980): 93-101. Suggests that Eva’s Man uses the structure of Gothic literature, specifically the downward spiral of the whirlpool, to express the violence and sexuality of the novel. As an insane woman obsessed with sex and certain that men are by nature brutal, Eva gets herself into ever-worse situations. At the same time, her narration gives the reader her experiences in the same intensifying, spiral fashion, providing an appropriate form for Eva’s madness and dark vision.
Byerman, Keith. “Intense Behaviors: The Use of the Grotesque in The Bluest Eye and Eva’s Man.” College Language Association Journal 25, no. 4 (1982): 447-457. Suggests that Eva is a “grotesque” character used by Jones to reproach the even more grotesque characteristics of American society, specifically the problem of male dominance. Eva’s final act represents both revenge upon many men and the sexual liberation of all women.
Davison, Carol M. “ Love ’Em and Lynch ’Em:’ The Castration Motif in Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man.” African American Review 29 (Fall, 1995): 393-410. Davison presents a Freudian analysis of the main character in Jones’s novel and shows how the views of female sexuality are portrayed in the book. An absorbing and useful study.
Dixon, Melvin. Ride out the Wilderness. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Dixon, Melvin. “Singing a Deep Song: Language as Evidence in the Novels by Gayl Jones.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Discusses the importance of language in Jones’s work and shows how she ritualizes language to emphasize the rhythms of dialogue. Suggests that Eva’s lack of redemption and inability to control her world are shown by her inarticulateness, her lack of control over language.
Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers: 1950-1980. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984.
Johnson, E. Patrick. “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues: A Blues Analysis of Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man.” Johnson demonstrates how Jones uses the blues to express the plight of African American women writers as distinct from their male counterparts. To form her text, Jones blends the oral and literary traditions of African Americans.
Pinckney, Darryl. Review of Eva’s Man, by Gayl Jones. The New Republic 174 (June 19, 1976): 27-28. Review that states that Jones’s work is an indictment of black men but that her works are an important addition to American literature in general and not merely to African American literature.
Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York, 1991. An insightful series of critical essays that focus on various women writers, including Gayl Jones. Includes bibliographical references for further reading.
Updike, John. Review of Eva’s Man, by Gayl Jones. The New Yorker 52 (August 9, 1976): 74-77. Negative review that argues that Jones’s artistic vision gives her character as many problems as do her circumstances.
Ward, Jerry W. “Escape from Trublem: The Fiction of Gayl Jones.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Examines the unrealistic, nonlinear form of Jones’s books. Suggests that although Jones’s novels represent a departure, Eva’s Man is similar to slave narratives; Eva is enslaved both by racism and sexism.
Wilcox, Janelle. “Resistant Silence, Resistant Subject: (Re)reading Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man.” Genders 23 (Spring, 1996): 72-96. Wilcox argues that the silence of the main character in Jones’s novel as well as the silence of the author herself since its publication in 1976 can be viewed as strategies of resistance. The novel has been criticized because it fails to conform to the reading codes of white literary history or the opposition parties of feminism and black nationalism, yet in recent years, it has been received more favorably.