ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison's theory appears to offer a promising avenue tor reconsidering Eudora Welty's "Moon Lake," a tantalizing tale of white girlhood. Morrison proposes that the true subject of the Africanist presence is the white dreamer; the subject of blackness is whiteness. Perhaps as an illustration of her preference for showing how textual worlds are invented, Morrison begins her book in first person, disclosing in personal narrative her reading of another (white) woman's autobiographical novel. While Morrison analyzes the muted "dark nurse" in American literature, Welty's staging of a looking black nurse maid in relation to the orphaned and outcast white girl ironically signals the text's awareness of white construction and upsets "Moon Lake"'s apparently feminist closure. "Moon Lake" simultaneously draws attention to and away from its poor white and black characters but the narrative effect is to cast a light on the middle-class girls' dreaming.
