Lila Mae The Abolitionist Analysis

Entangled in the struggles for power between races, ideology, and mega corporations, Lila Mae is a colored female Intuitionist elevator inspector who “is never wrong” (Whitehead 9) but is blamed for the fall of the elevator Number Eleven. In Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, the elevator falls into “a total freefall [which] is a physical impossibility” (35) and it is up to Lila Mae to find “the ferry across Earth to Heaven….: an Intuitionist black box” (98) to redeem herself. According to Selzer, as she gets closer to finding the black box, Lila Mae is “ever more in thrall to the seduction of uplift” (682), a promise “not only to transform the city physically, but also to transfigure race relations” (681). Selzer argues that the uplift, however,

Vertical thinking means “difference is understood hierarchically” (154) i.e. everything is set in a hierarchical order which hinders any upward vertical progress. “Verticality in racism in the racism and sexism impede[s] Lila Mae’s efforts to solve the novel’s mysteries and threaten her safety” (154).Black and white community, and any attachment on social values, therefore, thwart the uplift with their hierarchical structure. By the end of the novel, Lila Mae knows that if given into to the social structure, “the other world [Fulton] describes does not exist [and] there will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption” (240). Redemption is only found out of what is not expected by any social faction: “the elevator world will look like Heaven but not the Heaven you have reckoned” (241). To truly understand the black box, one needs to let go of the social structure. It is then by Lila Mae’s choice that she sacrifices the restricting community and body for the promised uplift. The Intuitionist, therefore, is about ascending beyond hierarchical structures, not for the sake of self or any racial faction but for the unbiased technological