The Crucial Ambivalence of Light and Darkness in Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones and Ellison’s Invisible Man

While Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones have both received significant critical attention, no work yet exists that reads these novels in relation to each other, despite the fact that they share many of the same themes and concerns. This article offers a comparative reading of these bildungsroman texts, with a specific focus on their depictions of light and darkness. In both novels, an ambiguous duality is established between these themes, and it is in this space of luminous ambiguity that the protagonists of these novels formulate their identities as racialized subjects in white post-war America. While light has traditionally been associated with truth and goodness and darkness with uncertainty and strife, especially within the hegemony of Christian tradition, both novels challenge this hierarchy. Marshall’s protagonist, Selina, comes to embrace the symbolic importance of both light and darkness for her identity formation, while Ellison’s protagonist, by the end of his narrative, favours light over darkness.