Writing, Recuperating, and Resuscitating Biracialism in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and Natasha Tretheway

CALIFORNIA ST ATE UNIVERSITY SAN MARCOS

THESIS SIGNATURE PAGE

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE

MASTER OF ARTS

LITERATURE AND WRITING

THESIS TITLE: From Girls to Women: (Re)Writing, Recuperating, and Resuscitating Biracialism in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and Natasha Tretheway

AUTHOR: Nicole Genne Corrigan

DATE OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE: April 25, 2017

THE THESIS HAS BEEN ACCEPTED BY THE THESIS COMMITTEE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF TI-IE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN LITERATURE AND WRITING.

Dr. Catherine Cucinella ~~ oJ/l:is/2017 THESIS COMMITTEE CHAIR SIGNATURE D/(TE'

Dr. Yuan Yuan THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER SIGNATURE

Dr. Susie Lan Cassel THESIS COMMITTEE MEMBER

Master of Arts in Literature and Writing Thesis

From Girls to Women: (Re)Writing, Recuperating, Resuscitating Biracialism in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and Natasha Tretheway

Committee: Dr. Catherine Cucinella, Dr. Yuan Yuan, Dr. Susie Lan Cassel

California State University San Marcos April 25, 2017 Nicole Genné Corrigan

Table of Contents

From Girls to Women: (Re)Writing, Recuperating, Resuscitating Biracialism in the Works of

Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and Natasha Tretheway ...... 1

Introduction: From Girls to Women: (Re)Writing, Recuperating, Resuscitating

Biracialism in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and

Natasha Tretheway...... 3

(Re)Writing the Tragic Mulatto: Excavating the BlackandWhite Biracial Woman in

Passing ...... 19

(Re)Writing Pathologies: Upending the Tragic Mulatto in The Bluest Eye ...... 37

Recuperating and Resuscitating: (Re)Claiming the Biracial Figure and Black Female

Subjectivity ...... 57

Conclusion: From Girls to Woman: (Re)Writing, Recuperating, Resuscitating Biracialism

in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and Natasha

Tretheway ...... 94

Works Cited ...... 101

Introduction: From Girls to Women: (Re)Writing, Recuperating, Resuscitating Biracialism in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and Natasha Tretheway

As I write these words, Rachel Dolezal’s story has already simmered into a book deal that many find unfair, as her book deal would allow her to profit from an extreme form of racial appropriation. Dolezal’s story, a story that threw the country into a state of confusion and a fit of comedic internet memes, unfolded when her parents went on national television to state that their white daughter had been passing for black. To some people, Dolezal was just outright crazy, and some people applauded Dolezal for the uplifting work she was doing in the black community.

But mostly people were just flat-out confused as to why a white woman would seemingly throw away her white privilege—privilege, as in something that garners unearned luxury, treatment, and/or opportunity—to pass as black. And to many people, Dolezal was that white woman, who had used her white privilege to misrepresent the black experience. These were the people who claimed that Dolezal had crossed the line with her exaggerated forms of racial appropriation.

Altogether, her story, her ability to pass as black and our ability to perceive her as black, garnered reactions that allowed audiences to think deeply about definitions of race. I would like to capitalize on this reaction and ask us to continue that train of deep and profound thinking as it pertains to the ways in which we think about and perceive race, the categories of race, as well as racial ambiguity.

When we think about our perceptions regarding race, we see that the categories of race are rather rigid; in fact, these categories are so rigid that all Dolezal had to do to be perceived as black was adorn herself in a few of the racial signifiers that society normalizes as synonymous with black. However, the fact that Dolezal, a white woman, could easily pass as a racially ambiguous, or biracial, black woman proves the ways in which racial classifications are both

3 arbitrarily and socially constructed. If we turn our attention to African American literature, this narrative of passing is largely at play. However, this “passing” narrative is not reminiscent of

Dolezal’s lived life (a white woman functioning in structures of white supremacy who chose to pass as black), but instead focuses on the racially-plural woman who can pass for white, and as a means of securing upward mobility that was denied to black people in a white supremacist society, does pass for white. Racially-plural women have been pathologically locked into a tragic mulatto literary trope that is still, to this day, ingrained in representations of the racially- plural/ambiguous biracial woman.

In African American literature, many of the biracial figures, whether intended or not, work to deconstruct the image of the tragic mulatto and these figures ultimately render alternative ways of thinking about race and the ways in which racial identification contributes to individual subjectivity. Although there are several male characters misconstrued as tragic mulatto, the tragic trope seemed to originate with biracial cis-women “mulatto1” characters. For this reason, I focus my study on the blackandwhite biracial woman character and examine how this particular narrative of biracialism, whether intentional or not, ultimately works to deconstruct the distorted tragic mulatto image. In doing so, I explore the ways in which these narratives of biracialism contribute to and complicate black diversity within African American literature. Within this focus, I present race as a social construct produced by the arbitrary and unreliable gaze. Through this unreliable gaze, racial identities, such as the tragic mulatto trope, are constructed and projected onto the individual. I argue that the deconstruction of the tragic mulatto reveals the trope as both a projection and a symptom of a white supremacist system; in this way, the deconstruction of the tragic mulatto is also a deconstruction of and a resistance to

1 The term “mulatto” carries a lot of baggage. For the purposes of this paper, the use of the word “mulatto” is employed as a direct reference to the tragic mulatto trope. 4

the any facets of white supremacy. If we are to widen our scope of deconstructing and/or

upending tropes, or stereotypes, like that of the tragic mulatto, ekphrasis should be considered as

a tool of deconstruction, a tool of upending, for it is the ekphrastic process that not only allows

us to deconstruct old, archaic, and essentializing tropes but also allows us to acknowledge black

diversity and reclaim histories lost to erasure. I further argue that a cerebral-corporeal, or

embodied, subjectivity proliferates and informs our understanding when it concerns black female

subjectivities. However, to begin this discussion, we must first look at the construction of race in

the United States of America and its impact on biracial women of color.

During the early to mid-1900s, there were a few different theories that helped construct notions of race. On the one hand, there was the biologist’s theory, and on the other, there was the culturalist theory. The biological theorists defined race as something that was visibly marked onto the body—it was physical. For the biologist, race could be determined by the physical characteristics of one’s body, and race was not only biological but also was perceived as that which determined the character, language, morality, psychology, and intelligence of an individual. Race then was intrinsically linked to the biological make-up of an individual. As

biologist thinkers would have it, race was something that could be tested. According to the

culturalist’s theory, however, the physical characteristics of an individual’s body varied from one

person to the next, and these discrepancies were evidence that race could not be scientifically, or

biologically, determined. With these discrepancies, the culturalists asserted that “physical

characteristics were completely unreliable indicators of race” (Pascoe 189). Racial signifiers,

such as skin color and hair type, were social constructions that aligned with popular belief. The

culturalists concluded that these signifiers were unreliable in defining the race of an individual.

And then there was a split in culturalist thought. Each type of culturalist asserted that character, morality, psychology, and language were, in fact, cultural in that these facets of life were learned and not biological. However, the new culturalist thought believed the physical characteristics of an individual could be explained by race and that “‘racial differences’ occurred only in ‘nonessentials such as texture of head hair, amount of body hair, shape of the nose or head, or color of the eyes and the skin’” (Pascoe 189). For the new culturalist, race was, yet again, defined as something that was biologically determined. Eugenicists also added to this biological argument in a proposition that “proposed strengthening state control over the marriages of the physically and racially unfit” (Pascoe 193). Because miscegenation laws relied on racial categories, the Courts decided that the dismantling of white supremacy could be achieved by erasing this type of racial terminology. The goal was to make sure that the laws were essentially color-blind. This erasure led to the success of cases such as Brown v. Board of

Education. The downside to this erasure is that racial categories were impossible to fully eradicate because the biological determination of race was something that had been so deeply ingrained in the political and social history of the United States. As we see in the statutes formulated to prohibit interracial marriage, the biological theory of race won out and although there has never been an individual biologically tested for race, the idea that race was physically marked and visible on the body seemed to be perpetuated in both social and legal constructions of race.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant see race as neither an essence (biological) nor an illusion (ideological). Instead, the two theorists define race as the accumulation of signifiers, symbols, and references in that “race is a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (110). Omi and Winant explain that

“the categories employed to differentiate among human beings along racial lines reveal

themselves upon serious examination, to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary

(111). The two authors further explain that although racial categories are, at times, found to be

arbitrary, they do carry tremendous meaning.

Prior to the antebellum period, passing was not a racialized concept. In the seventeenth

and the eighteenth centuries, there were white indentured servants working alongside Africans

who had been enslaved, and both positions held the same status within society. During this pre- antebellum period, the people, Black and White alike, passed as free. As long as the passing individual, Black and White alike, had some sort of written pass, which could easily be forged, duplicated, or borrowed, the individual could easily pass for free. It was not until the nineteenth- century antebellum that this idea of passing drastically changed. Judge William Harper’s 1831 assertion stated that “a slave cannot be a white man” (Harper qtd. in Hobbs 32). With these changes, passing-for-free turned into passing-for-white. In other words, whiteness became the color of freedom. If an enslaved person could pass for white, the person could then pass as someone who is free and neither indentured nor enslaved. According to Allyson Hobbs, author of

A Chosen Exile, passing for white triggered an anxiety that revolved around maintaining a rigid and inflexible definition of whiteness: “as the system of racialized slavery matured, nineteenth- century Americans underwent a moral panic about the parameters of whiteness” (Hobbs 42). To maintain these categorical parameters, the nation held tighter and tighter to the biological determination of race and etched racial categories into U.S. statutes.

The categories of race that had been arbitrarily2 constructed during the nineteenth-century

became the basis of racial definitions applied to statutes in the early to mid twentieth-century.

2 To further explain this idea of racial signifiers being arbitrarily assigned to one race or another, I reference the story of Black Matt and Sam. According to Allyson Hobbs’ A Chosen Exile, this story, or account, was published in 7

These definitions ultimately revolved around the idea that race was visibly marked on the body.

Laws of segregation were backed by this definition of race, as were the laws that prohibited interracial marriage. As we see in miscegenation cases, race became something that was solely, or popularly, defined by the physical. The racial identity of the individual was thought to be biologically determined, and the gaze was perceived as a reliable tool to determine the race of an individual. In fact, the gaze ultimately became the tool that was and is, to this day, used to determine the race of any given individual.

The categorization of race is essentially a strategy used to displace and/or other subordinate groups from dominant groups, and the gaze, as a tool, made this specific strategy accessible to anyone with an ability to glance. According to Paul R. Spickard’s “The Illogic of

American Racial Categories,” race and class are both socially constructed tools of oppression.

Spickard explains that race and class produce a social distinction that arrives “when two or more groups of people come together in a situation of economic or status competition” (149). When this type of competition occurs, race becomes an oppressive tool for the dominant group. For example, prior to the United States’ era of enslavement, the “people in Africa did not experience their lives as Africans or as Blacks; they were Hausa or Ibo or Fon, or members of any of several other groups. But when they were brought to America they were defined as a single group by the

Europeans who held power over their lives. They were lumped together as Africans or Negroes

a Philadelphia newspaper in 1859. The story is basically told as follows: Black Matt, a slave trader, whose skin was a dark complexion, purchased Sam, a mulatto with a very light complexion. However, when Black Matt tried to sell Sam at a slave trader auction, Sam turned around and sold Black Matt, exclaiming that “this body servant [Black Matt] came with one troublesome, ‘ridiculous’ fault . . . ‘He [Black Matt] imagines himself a white man’ . . . . and Black Matt’s entreaties that he was indeed a white man fell on [the slave trader’s] deaf ears until he [Black Matt] was able to produce evidence that identified him as a free citizen of the United States” (Hobbs 29). There are two key points to glean from this story: the first is that race is a lived experience but it is also a social construction in that there are sets of social signifiers (such as skin color, hair texture, facial features, et cetera) that have been attributed to one race or another, and the second point in this story is that these social signifiers are arbitrary in that they are unreliable indicators of race. 8

or Blacks” (Spickard 150). To place this type of singular definition onto an entire group made it

easier for the dominate group to easily construct “negative myths about the moral qualities of

those people” who were subject to subordination (Spickard 150). However, because racial labels

establish community, race is also a tool that can be used to resist oppression.

Spickard states that both racial and ethnic categories function in the same way in that

categories “identify a set of people with whom to share a sense of identity and common

experience.” And for a group of people who are subjected to the dominance of another group,

racial categories become “a positive tool, a source of belonging, mutual help, and self-esteem”

(Spickard 150). Race then becomes a tool that not only establishes community but promotes

political action because of its ability to bring people together who share common experiences.

Spickard states that race is a powerful social construction because it can be used to dominate and

oppress an entire group of people, but that it can also be used for self-actualization within the

groups of people who are being subjected to oppression. It is also important to note that

categories of race were solidified by the one-drop rule. Spickard explains that the one-drop rule’s

function was “to make sure that no one who might possibly be identified as Black also became

identified as White” (150). The implications of this rule are tremendous. The one-drop rule not

only coddled the myth of white purity and pacified the white anxiety that arose out of trying to

maintain that mythical purity. The one drop rule also kept racial categories alive and

systematically thriving in the wake of its own oppression because, if we recall Spickard’s take on

race as a strategy for oppression, the one-drop rule ensures that the inflexible-construction of these racial categories is kept intact. And if these categories are maintained, structures of white supremacy are maintained, systematic oppression is maintained.

U.S. statutes, for instance, show us that the categories of race were used as boundaries to

enforce segregation. The boundaries of segregation reflected the boundaries within racial

categorizations. The Plessey v. Ferguson case which stemmed from “a dispute over

transportation facilities in Louisiana” ruled, on May 18th, in 1896, in favor of “separate but equal public facilities for blacks,” and used Louisiana’s segregation law of 1890 as a precedence to enforce the institutional separations (Hornsby 55). Within this separate but supposedly equal railway, the ruling declared “that the officers of such passenger trains shall have the power and hereby required to assign each passenger to the coach or compartment used for the race to which such passenger belongs” (U.S. Supreme Court qtd. in Hornsby 444). This placement was at the discretion of the individual officer at each of the railways, and this segregation is the type of anxiety that carried on over into the turn of the century. By 1938, not much seemed to change in that the Missouri ex rel Gaines case reconfirmed and widened the scope of what had already been dictated in the Plessey v. Ferguson case: “that states must provide equal, even if separate, educational facilities for blacks within their boundaries” (Hornsby 84). The implication of these kinds of laws was that race could be determined by physical markers, such as skin color, on the body.

The Kirby v Kirby case of 1921 gave further legitimacy to racial signifiers. This case details the story of Joe Kirby and Mayellen Kirby. Seeking an annulment, Joe brought his wife to court, claiming that Mayellen was in direct violation of Arizona’s anti-miscegenation statutes because, per Joe, she was a Black woman who had passed as White and had, therefore, lied about her race. I should also note that although the court case revealed, through the testimony of Joe’s mother, that Joe was of Spanish and Mexican descent, Joe stated that he was White and was, therefore, considered White in the eyes of the court. In conclusion, the judge ruled in Joe’s favor

10 and granted him the annulment on the basis that Mayellen had allegedly lied about her race because, according to the courts, her “race was assumed to rest in her visible physical characteristics” (Pascoe 186). This case is a prime example of how U.S. laws concerning race were built on the gaze. If someone looked white, the person was white. If someone looked black, the person was black. Race was thought of as something that was biological, as something that could be biologically tested, but again and again, case after case, law after law, race was and has always been determined by the gaze.

In Virginia’s attempt to maintain this white supremacy as well as the segregation that white supremacy produced, the 1924 “Act to Preserve Racial Integrity” was created. This act blatantly legitimized race as something that could be biologically, or physically, determined. The act states that

If there is reasonable cause to disbelieve that applicants are of pure white race,

when that fact is stated, the clerk or deputy clerk shall withhold the granting of the

license until satisfactory proof is produced that both applicants are “white

persons” as provided for by this act. The clerk or deputy clerk shall use the same

care to assure himself that both applicants are colored when that fact is claimed. It

shall be hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this state to marry any save

a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and

American Indian. (“The Virginia ‘Act to Preserve Racial Integrity’ of 1921”

Sollors 24)

The basis of this law is that one merely had to look at someone to determine that someone’s race.

In this way, race was being socially, arbitrarily, and unreliably constructed. This act not only perpetuated the ridiculous notion of racial purity—because how could there be a pure race if the

11 unreliable gaze is the definer of race—but also gave legitimacy to the way that race is not biological but instead is a construct built by the society in which race functions. The gaze is unreliable and arbitrary; therefore, race is arbitrary and unreliable.

Within such cases, it is also important to note that, more times than not, the female body was put on trial. The Rhinelander case of 1925, for instance, put the female body under a microscope and further established race as something that was determined by the gaze thus visibly marked on the body. In 1925, Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife Alice Beatrice

Jones for an annulment on the grounds that she, his wife, had lied about her race. As the

Rhinelander case unfolded, each lawyer seemed to embrace a set of images that left the image of the black biracial woman in a bifurcated position. Rhinelander’s lawyer adorned Jones with imperialistic images: Jones, a female, was described as the dominating force of seduction that had deceitfully subjugated and aggressively colonized Rhinelander into a submissive position that ultimately willed him to marry her. To repudiate the aforementioned images, Jones’ lawyer inverted the images and introduced the types of images that re-presented the black woman not as subject but, once again, as an object that had been dominated, subjugated, and colonized. The trial ultimately placed the image of black women into a binary: black women were either perceived as passive or aggressive, submissive or hungry for power. Moreover, Jones’ lawyer also presented Jones’ body as evidence, stating that because her body supposedly looked black, there was no way that she could have deceived Rhinelander. Altogether, the Rhinelander case

“lent legitimacy to reducing a black woman’s character to her body and to defining identity by skin color” (Wacks 177). In using Jones’ body as evidence, the lawyer, in one swift move, gave legitimacy to the already fixed notion that race was always a visible identity.

In 1939, the Estate of Monks case presented yet another example of how race is determined by the gaze in the United States. This case details the relationship between Allan and

Marie Antoinette Monks: the two were married until Allan died. However, in the wake of his death, it was found out that he had left two wills. The newer will left everything to his wife,

Marie Antoinette, and the old will favored a friend of Allan’s. The friend proclaimed that the newer will was fraudulent and took Marie Antoinette to court because Marie Antoinette was a black woman “and therefore prohibited by Arizona law from marrying Allan Monks, whom the court presumed to be Caucasian” (Pascoe 191). The entire trial turned into an investigation on

Marie Antoinette’s race. As per Arizona’s Marriage and Divorce law, a statute established in

1913, “all marriages of persons of Caucasian blood, or their descendants, with negroes,

Mongolians or Indians, and their descendants, shall be null and void” (Sollors 24). Allan’s friend gathered an entourage of so-called expert witnesses that spoke to the ways Mrs. Monk physically embodied specific black “indicators of race,” and the so-called friend won the case (Pascoe 191).

The judge proclaimed that Marie Antoinette Monk was not a beneficiary of Allan Monk’s will because, according to the statutes of Arizona, Marie Antoinette’s assumed race—it was assumed that she was one-eighth black—negated her marriage to Allan. The implication here is that race could be found in the body, could be seen, and could be gazed upon.

It was not until the 1947 Perez v. Lippold case that the prohibition of interracial marriages became unconstitutional. When Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis sought a marriage license that was declined by California’s miscegenation law, the couple challenged the validity of the law and won. The judge declared California’s miscegenation law as unconstitutional.

However, it is the case of Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1967) that lifted the nationwide ban of interracial marriages. Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, an interracial couple challenged

the Virginia law that prohibited interracial marriages. In June of 1958, the two were indicted on

charges that were in direct violation of the Virginia law that prohibited interracial marriages. The

Lovings were eventually sentenced to a year in jail, but the Lovings filed a motion to vacate their

sentence, and their case eventually made its way into the Supreme Court of Appeals. In

conclusion, their sentence was overturned because Virginia’s state law did not uphold the basis

of the Fourteenth Amendment, which “requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be

restricted by invidious racial discriminations” (Sollors 34). Although this case was foundational

for civil rights, it did not seem to change the notion that race was a solely and absolutely visible

aspect of identity. The idea that the gaze could determine an individual’s race remained intact.

The seemingly rigid definitions of race hinge on either/or thinking, constructions, and

definitions, such as black or white, etc. Such rigid classifications leave little room for the reality

and/or acknowledgment of racially ambiguous individuals—the individuals that are not so easily

placed by the beholder into one category or another. For these reasons, there are several tropes,

such as the tragic mulatto, that have distorted and mystified the blackandwhite racially

ambiguous figure; therefore, we must look at literature and art to explore the corporeal-cerebral subjectivity of figures that are racially ambiguous. To that end, I would like to take a moment to review the mystification of the tragic mulatto.

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia defines the tragic mulatto as a figure that has been defined and redefined over the years. This particular figure was originally introduced by DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1871) in which the tragic mulatto was a young woman and was described as weakness that will infect, or place a blight, upon the nation. This film portrayed the "cold-hearted, hateful-seductress . . . pathologies supposedly inherent in the tragic mulatto stereotype." The 19th century novelist Lydia Maria Child only contributed to the build-up of this

14 particular stereotype and presented the "light skinned woman as the offspring of a white slaveholder and his black female slave . . . She was ignorant of both her mother's race and her own. She believed herself to be white and free. Her heart was pure, her manners impeccable, her language polished, and her face beautiful. Her father died; her 'negro blood' discovered, she was remanded to slavery, deserted by her white lover, and died a victim of slavery and white male violence" (Pilgrim). The portrayal of the tragic mulatto was one that positioned the blackandwhite biracial woman in borderland territory. She was perpetually on the outskirt cusp or bifurcated margin, always looking out at and never really, fully, portrayed as embodying any racial identity.

At the turn of the century, however, the pathology of the tragic mulatto began to hold center stage. During the 20th century, both literary and cinematic representations of the tragic mulatto revolved around "self-hatred, depression, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and suicide attempts . . . [and] If light enough to 'pass' as white, she did, but passing led to deeper self- loathing. She pitied or despised blacks and the 'blackness' in herself; she hated or feared whites yet desperately sought their approval. In a race-based society, the tragic mulatto found peace only in death. She evoked pity or scorn, not sympathy" (Pilgrim). In this way, the mythic figure is not only portrayed as a mere onlooker of racial identity but hates everything in sight on both sides. The 1930s film Imitation of Life, for instance, both in novel and film form, redefined the tragic mulatto and noted her as "a selfish woman who will give up all, including her black family, in order to live as a white person." This particular portrayal of the tragic mulatto is "tired of being treated as a second-class citizen. . . . [She] wants more . . . [wants] to have the opportunities that whites enjoy . . . wants to be loved by a white man, to marry a white man . . .

[and] wants to live without the stigma of being black." According to Sterling Brown, white

writers insisted “their favorite character, the octoroon, wretched because of the 'single drop of

midnight in her veins,' desires a white lover above all else, and must therefore go down to a

tragic end (Brown qtd. in Pilgrim). In many regards, white writers present the mythic figure as

occupying a position “of almost.” She is almost white but not quite, and that is presented as the

source of her unhappiness.

Collins explains that the negative images (mammy, welfare queen, that have been applied

to Black women are basically “distorted renderings of those aspects of our behavior [or actions]

that threaten existing power arrangements” (Gilkes and D. White qtd. in Collins 107). As we see

with the one drop rule, the biracial figure is a threat to the seemingly rigid racial categories,

which is ultimately a threat to structures of oppression and systems of white supremacy. The

mere existence of the black-and-white biracial individual is a threat, and the tragic mulatto is a

strategy to extinguish such threat.

If we examine this strategy of extinguishing, we see that the pathological traits of the

tragic mulatto are so intricately ingrained in representations of blackandwhite biracial women

characters that, at times, it is easy to forget, or gloss over, the fact that pathological remnants of

this figure are in fact present. Danzy Senna coined the turn of the millennium as some kind of

“mulatto millennium3,” suggesting that we have reached a period in which the blackandwhite

biracial figure is a topic that is heavy in popular culture, and her suggestive term is quite prophetic. Being biracial has become somewhat of a trendy topic to explore, but with this trend of exploration, there are also undertones of the archaic tragic mulatto trope. When we look at portrayals of blackandwhite women, and even young girls, in television, film and cinema, we especially see this trendy trope.

3 From the book Half and Half, “The Mulatto Millennium” is a piece of satire written by Danzy Senna. 16

For example, in 2011, Yelling to the Sky, an independent film, introduces Zoey Kravitz as

Sweetness O’Hara, a biracial teen who turns to alcohol and substance abuse to cope with her family issues and is subjected to the violence inflicted upon her by a white male, who happens to be her father. O’Hara, whose name is also a throwback reference to the bifurcated civil war film

Gone with the Wind (1939), exhibits depression, greed, alcoholism, and mostly evokes scorn not sympathy—all of which are remnant pathologies of the tragic mulatto. Black or White (2014) is another film about a young biracial girl who is literally asked to choose between her blackandwhite heritage, which is remnant of the tragic mulatto’s passing narrative where the

“mulatto” figure has a choice of either passing or not passing for white. Later in 2014, the satire

Dear White People is released and is led by a young biracial woman in college, who yet again feels like she must choose between black and white ultimately she chooses her black heritage but the ramifications leave her with a touch of melancholy that is eventually expressed by the end of the film. When examination is turned toward television, there are even more remnants of the tragic mulatto in television representations that concern blackandwhite, or biracially black, women. Girlfriends (2008-2009), for instance, featured Lynn Searcy, the blackandwhite and racially ambiguous woman who, at some point, deals with the perceived bifurcation of her blackandwhite racial identity. Furthermore, Searcy also has a knack for sexual perversion. Out of the four representations of black female characters, Searcy is labeled as sexually promiscuous, and when the four women discuss sex, Searcy often shocks the other women with her promiscuous tales filled with taboo aspects of sexuality. As one can see, many of the blackandwhite biracial figures in film and television still exhibit remnants of the archaic pathological traits that pertained to the tragic mulatto, but within African American literatures, these aspects seem to be present as a means of deconstruction, which is why I have chosen to

focus my study on the blackandwhite biracial women figures that appear in aspects of literature

other than film and television. It is within these aspects that we see the foundation of the tragic

mulatto; for this reason, I begin my work discussing the ways that black women writers have

worked to deconstruct, complicate, and/or move beyond this trope and into subjectivity.

Nella Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye both present and

deconstructs the tragic mulatto trope in significantly distinct ways. While Larsen demystifies the

tragic mulatto by exploring race as an arbitrary construct, Morrison completely and unabashedly

upends the tragic mulatto by subverting all notions of what the tragic mulatto is suppose to look

like. In chapter 1, I examine the ways in which the traditional tragic mulatto’s pathological

longing to pass as white is featured in ways that not only subvert and maintain systems of white

supremacy, but, in many ways, reveal race itself as an arbitrarily-conducted, socially constructed

concept that is largely determined by the unreliable gaze. Through a series of subversions within

Larsen’s work, I assert black self-love as a form of resistance in a white supremacist society and ultimately argue that the tragic mulatto is a projected product constructed by the unreliable gaze functioning within a white supremacist system. In chapter 2, I move beyond the ways in which the tragic mulatto is a projected construction and examine the ways in which Morrison’s work builds upon the concept of subversion and pushes against the confines of the tragic mulatto trope by placing the passing narrative in the hands of Pecola Breedlove. I argue that Morrison not only rewrites the biracial figure out of the confinement of the tragic mulatto trope but upends this trope in a way that reveals the pathologies of the tragic mulatto as mere symptoms of a white supremacist system. Morrison’s work, in many ways, liberates the blackandwhite biracial figure from the confining tragic mulatto trope and ultimately opens the door to explore diverse representations of black women and their embodied subjectivities, which I do in chapter 3.

Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus and Natasha Tretheway’s Bellocq’s

Ophelia both employ ekphrasis as a means of recuperating images and stories that have been historically erased, and prove ekphrasis to be a critical tool to explore embodied subjectivities. In

this way, ekphrastic writing in and of itself becomes a tool to subvert the normalization of

historical erasure. My assertions in chapter 3 revolve around ekphrasis as a tool to recuperate and

explore embodied subjectivities that have been historically erased. While Lewis’ excavations

work to show us the ways in which white artists and curators have been complicit in the erasure of black bodies and their embodied subjectivity, Tretheway’s work builds upon this idea of embodied subjectivity by ekphrastically resuscitating a black biracial woman’s body from historical erasure to provide a framework for this woman to step into a more autonomous position of subjectivity. And just as Larsen’s Passing reveals the gaze as an unreliable indicator of racial classification, these two poet authors both reveal the gaze as a failed attempt at racial definition. I argue that these two poet authors prove ekphrasis to be a conduit to lost histories, which are not only reclaimed but are foundational to understanding embodied subjectivities.

In other words, my feminist analysis focuses on women writers and their narratives of blackandwhite biracialism but more specifically focuses on the ways in which these women

writers subvert ideologies of white supremacy. On one hand, both Larsen and Morrison deal with

a narrative of biracialism that specifically subverts the tragic mulatto trope. In Larsen’s work, the passing narrative of the tragic mulatto not only subverts establishments of white supremacy but also subverts psychological spaces of white supremacy. Morrison, on the other hand, gives readers an unconventional narrative of biracialism that completely upends the tragic mulatto trope, which ultimately subverts what we have come to know about the tragic mulatto. With

Morrison’s subversive narrative, the tragic mulatto breaches the confines of trope and becomes a

19 symptom of a white supremacist system. In other words, Morrison’s work serves as a cautionary tale: if you are black and living within a system of white supremacy, you may exhibit or be susceptible to symptoms that are reminiscent of the tragic mulatto. For Lewis and Tretheway, their writing technique essentially becomes an act of subversion. Both poet authors, Lewis and

Tretheway, engage ekphrastic writing as a means of recuperating erased histories and subverting the ways in which the erasure of black history, including narratives of blackandwhite biracialism, has been normalized in the white Western imagination. Altogether, these women writers—

Larsen, Morrison, Lewis, Tretheway— not only (re)write narratives of biracialism, but in their refusal to be complicit in the erasure of blackness, their works also recuperate and resuscitate a variety of unrecognized narratives.

(Re)Writing the Tragic Mulatto: Excavating the BlackandWhite Biracial Woman in Passing

Set in a 1920’s romanticized Harlem, Larsen’s Passing details the story of two biracial women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who both have experience in passing for white. In a world where Harlem is a Renaissance town filled with hope for equality, and spaces of white supremacy are consistently enforcing segregation, the two friends become reacquainted through an accidental reunion and embark on a journey of racial crossing. While Irene occasionally passes for conveniences that would not have been given to her otherwise, Clare has made a life of passing. It is within one of these passing experiences that the two friends reunite and spiral into a tragic conclusion. As Clare and Irene become closer, Clare insists on outing herself by publicly acknowledging her own blackness. Irene, on the other hand, becomes more and more paranoid about Clare’s overall intentions. The more paranoid Irene gets, the more willing Clare is to publicly embrace her black heritage that she has exchanged for years of passing, but when

Irene finally reaches the height of her paranoia, Clare plummets to her death from a high-rise building window. Between these two foil-like characters, Larsen’s novel reveals passing as a threat to and a sustaining of a white supremacist society.

Ultimately, passing is a double-edged sword: the act of passing does present multiple threats, but it also sustains power structures of white supremacy. In Larsen’s novel, Clare has been passing for so long that she has adopted the white supremacist values that circulate within such a system. In this way, her passing threatens rigid racial classifications and subverts the system, but her beliefs reinforce that very same system. In other words, Clare’s passing threatens and maintains the white supremacy that exists within such a system. And Irene’s passing works in a similar fashion. Irene’s passing subverts white supremacy, just as Clare’s passing does, yet her belief that race is something that is biologically determined is a notion that, through its

essentializing of blackness, only serves as a reinforcement of white supremacy. Irene’s passing

subverts white spaces, but her belief maintains white supremacy because her belief is one which

upholds the rigid mono-racial classifications constructed within such a divisive system. For Clare

and Irene, the willingness to pass is a symptom of a white supremacist society and is, therefore,

not only a threat to but a maintaining of that white supremacy.

As per Hazel Carby’s foundational text, Reconstructing Womanhood the Emergence of

the Afro-American Woman Novelist, the biracial character can be understood as both metaphor and mediation. Through the act of passing, the fictional figure could cross racial lines that were otherwise segregated, and, therefore, the figure could either be posited as a mediator of integration and/or as a displacement of segregation. To this end, many critics read passing as metaphor for race relations and/or the arbitrariness of racial categories. On the other hand, there are also some critics who read passing as an action that resists the arbitrary construction of race.

For instance, Thadious Davis’ Nella Larsen Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance understands the connection between Clare and Irene as one that is symbiotic—the two women cannot survive without one another. Davis states that race is both collective and arbitrary and explains that racial categories are symbiotic in the same way that Clare and Irene’s relationship is symbiotic.

Ultimately, Davis asserts that Larsen’s novel is, in fact, a “demystification of the woman of color

[that] . . . rejects any totalizing . . . even though it explores the cultural conditions and proscriptions that shape, but do not determine, the life of a female of color” (309). Allyson

Hobbs’ A Chosen Exile pushes this symbiotic relationship further, stating that both Clare and

Irene cannot maintain their social status without one another. If Clare untethers from her claim of whiteness, Irene cannot maintain her blackness and vice versa. Hobbs generally explores the novel’s racialized system of power, and the problems this system creates for an individual who is

22 trying to build “a stable sense of self” (202). Ultimately, Hobbs explains that in order for Irene to maintain her “fixed place [middle-class and with her husband] in black society,” Clare “must remain white” (203). If either of the women untether from the fixity of a black or white binary, they lose their societal status. In Hobbs’ reading of Larsen’s work, both women are ultimately doomed by a fixed regime of binaries. The women are either black or white and cannot be both.

Bell hooks’ Black Looks retrieves a similar reading, but hooks understands this fixed regime as white supremacy and asks readers to examine the love for blackness as a form of resistance to such a stifling system. On the other hand, Claudia Tate’s article Nella Larsen’s Passing: A

Problem of Interpretation asserts that although Passing does, in some ways, conform to the stereotypical characteristics of the tragic mulatto, the tragic mulatto interpretation is inadequate because the characters are not exact reflections of this stereotype. Tate explains that the racial theme within Larsen’s work is not a metaphor to examine social issues of injustice; instead,

Larsen’s racial theme is merely a narrative device to push the story forward with suspense.

I have built upon these assertions as a means of contributing something equally meaningful to this discussion. In doing so, I concur with Tate’s assertion. Passing conforms to the tragic mulatto stereotype in only some ways; however, unlike Tate, I do not completely discard the tragic mulatto reading. I see Larsen’s work as a deconstruction of the tragic mulatto stereotype. According to Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought, the negative images that are created and attributed to representations of Black women are nothing but distorted fragments meant to control that which threatens systems of power. Hooks describes these power arrangements as an overall system of white supremacy. Drawing from the work of both Davis and Hobbs, I examine the fixed and fluid states of race and argue that the tragic mulatto stereotype is actually constructed through the semiotic relationship between Irene and Clare. The

racially ambiguous biracial figure can easily pass for white, and both, passing and biracialism,

are synonymous with the tragic mulatto; therefore, the passing biracial figure is perceived as a

threat to existing power arrangements of white supremacy. Larsen’s work conforms to and

dissents from the tragic mulatto stereotype to ultimately reveal, subvert, and perhaps displace,

the biracial figure’s synonymous connection to the tragic mulatto. In this way, the novel

demystifies the controlling images that are applied to representations of blackness. Larsen’s

novel is an attempt to rescue, or perhaps recover, the biracial image from the tragic mulatto

stereotype.

I assert that the biracial figure’s passing is not that of the tragic mulatto but is instead an

act that presents race as an arbitrary construct, which, in turn, subverts, and at times maintains,

systems of white supremacy. To control this threatening image of integration, subversion, and

resistance, the tragic mulatto figure was created. For these reasons, I understand the biracial

figure as a threat to systems of white supremacy. Ultimately, Larsen’s work toys with the

distorted rendering of the biracial figure, only to position the tragic mulatto as a conduit to

examine the corporeal-cerebral subjectivity of a racially ambiguous woman. In this way,

Larsen’s work is a look at black subjectivity within a white supremacist system. As Larsen

journeys into the subjectivity of racially ambiguous women existing in early twentieth century

literature, the author’s passing narrative theoretically aligns itself with race as a social construct

and works to expose the arbitrariness of the seemingly-rigid racial classifications. Through this journey, Larsen’s work not only subverts mythical characters and readerly expectations but also subverts societal notions regarding the existence of interracial couples.

Before we proceed, I would like to take a moment to review the tragic mulatto’s

pathological traits. The tragic mulatto is an archetype that has been used to [mis]represent black-

and-white biracial figures, usually female, in both cinema and literature. The characteristics that

are commonly attributed to the tragic mulatto figure revolve around a self-loathing followed by a

tragic ending and/or conclusion. Because the tragic mulatto was often portrayed as being a

selfish, cold hearted, seductress woman who had a thirst for power, this particular

characterization was known to evoke either pity or scorn but never sympathy. And her tragedy

was usually portrayed as punishment for wanting to be white. She could pass for white, but her

passing almost always led to more self-loathing. The true tragedy was that the “mulatto” knew not of self-love. The tragic mulatto hated that the one thing that kept her from being white was her black heritage—she hated her blackness—and her hatred also extended to the whites that she desperately and consistently sought approval from. She pitied blacks and feared whites. More often than not, the “mulatto’s” tragic ending was that the only peace she was ever able to find was in death.

This archetype is ultimately a construction that projects white supremacist beliefs onto the biracial figure. Dr. David Pilgrim, Ferris State University Professor of Sociology, asserts that

“the tragic mulatto was more myth than reality . . . [because] the mulatto was made tragic in the minds of whites who reasoned that the greatest tragedy was to be near-white.” The tragic mulatto is a constructed representation that reflects the “testaments to the commonly held [and white supremacist] belief that ‘mixed blood’ brought sorrow” (Pilgrim). Within a white supremacist society, the blackandwhite biracial figure’s sorrow was believed to revolve around the notion that this figure could have been white had it not been for a blackandwhite heritage. To demystify this myth, it is important to understand that although “the tragic mulatto stereotype claims that mulattoes occupy the margins of two worlds, fitting into neither, accepted by neither. This is not true of real life mulattos.” As the myth of the tragic mulatto is deconstructed, it is critical to

25 remember that the tragic mulatto is ultimately the result of white supremacy at work within the literary imagination.

Larsen seems to rewrite the tragic mulatto in a way that mimics the appearance of a totalizing white supremacist system. The tragic mulatto archetype is consistently placed at the racial margins of an identity that has been fractured into two distinct identities—black and white.

But Larsen places this archetype as center. Larsen moves this archetype from the margins and into the “center of analysis,” and “far from being a narcissistic or trivial concern, this placement of self at the center of analysis is critical for understanding a host of other relationships” such as one’s relationship to and with larger communities” (Collins 123). It is within this placement that readers can begin to grasp at the complexity that exists beyond what appears to be the tragic, self-loathing “mulatto.” Although Clare’s pathology does resemble that of the tragic mulatto archetype, Larsen rewrites this archetype in a way that reveals the cracks within an archetype that seems to totalize the biracial experience as well as the history of passing. In other words, although Larsen’s characters parrot the pathological traits of the tragic mulatto, her characters are also a subversion of the tragic mulatto. And through this subversion, Larsen’s tragic mulatto becomes one of the many successful vehicles for resistance to a seemingly totalizing system of white supremacy. It is Larsen’s tragic mulatto character that ultimately reveals all the cracks and fissures in a system that only appears to be totalizing. I personally see Larsen’s novel as a subversion of the distorted characteristics that have been pathologically attributed to the biracial, or “mulatto,” figure in a way that make the “mulatto” seem tragic.

As readers see with Irene, Clare is never really accepted as black. Throughout the novel,

Irene is continually marking Clare with tragic mulatto characteristics. According to Irene, Clare made frequent visits, but “no matter how often she came among them, she still remained

someone apart, a little mysterious and strange” (64). Clare, as understood by Irene, never really

fits into black Harlem. Throughout the novel, Irene even makes numerous comments about Clare

being strange and out of place. Clare is the character who, in accordance with Irene’s

perspective, consistently remains “apart” from black Harlem. Furthermore, it is Irene who

dresses Clare in the selfish characteristic of the tragic mulatto. Clare’s interest in her own black

heritage is perceived, by Irene, as “a selfish whim” (53). And when Clare and Irene recall an old

friend who had converted to Judaism, Clare undermines the conversation by assuming that the

old friend had been passing as Jewish. Irene, in response to this assumption, explains to Clare

that “everyone doesn’t do everything for gain” (27). The implication here is that Clare’s passing

is “for gain.” Irene believes that Clare is selfishly choosing to pass as white to obtain economical

items like wealth and social status.

However, as Clare recounts the life she lived with her aunts, readers see that passing was

initially forced onto Clare. It was not of her choosing. Her aunts

belonged to the generation that had written and read long articles headed: Will the

Blacks Work . . . they didn’t want anyone to know that their darling brother had

seduced—ruined they called it—a Negro girl. They could forgive the ruin, but

they couldn’t forgive the tar-brush. They forbade me to mention Negroes to the

neighbors. . . . when the chance to get away came, that omission was of great

value to me. . . . for, of course, I was determined to get away, to be a person and

not a charity or a problem. (17-18)

As Clare gets older, she then uses this seemingly white supremacist practice of passing as a form of survival. When the history of passing is examined, it is clear that “passing became a crucial means through which African Americans called for the recognition of their own humanity”

(Hobbs 31). With this reading, Clare’s choice to pass is a form of resistance, a demand for the

recognition of her own humanity. It was a way for her to not only retain a sense of dignity but

obtain autonomy. However, Clare’s passing as a demand for this recognition, civility, and

autonomy is also an acknowledgment that black communities are denied, perhaps robbed of,

these civil liberties. As Clare attempts a sort of reclaiming of her blackness, she is fully aware of

the injustices she will inevitably face. For these reasons, Irene’s perspective, not the

characterization of Clare, proves to be a mere reflection of the tragic mulatto. Although Tate

asserts Passing’s racial theme as a narrative device to push the story forward, I ask readers to

examine Irene’s perspective as the conduit that projects tragic mulatto characteristics onto Clare.

In this way, Irene is the architect, constructing, and Clare, as tragic mulatto, is that which has

been constructed by Irene. Clare, as tragic mulatto, is constructed by the semiotic relationship

between Clare and Irene, and Larsen’s tragic mulatto figure becomes a deconstruction of the

tragic mulatto stereotype by showing the figures’ constructed nature.

Although Irene’s perspective adorns Clare in the “selfish, and cold, and hard”

characteristics of the tragic mulatto, Larsen’s characterization of Clare deconstructs the tragic

mulatto stereotype by describing Clare as having “a strange capacity of transforming warmth and

passion” (2). Clare’s feelings of envy are also in direct contrast with the tragic mulatto. Clare

does not hate the black community; in fact, she has never despised her own blackness: she was

envious. This envy can be found as Clare recalls memories of her life with her aunts, stating “I used almost to hate all of you. You had all the things I wanted and never had had” (17). On one hand, Clare blatantly says she, at one point, hated all of her old friends from black Harlem, but, on the other hand, her confession does not read like the despising hatred that is commonly found in the tragic mulatto. The tragic mulatto hates her own blackness so much that she is continually

running from her own black heritage. The only time the tragic mulatto figure repents is when she

is forced to face a tragedy, and even then there may not be repentance. Clare does not hate her

own blackness, and she is not perpetually running from her own heritage. Because Clare was

forced to abandon her black heritage and pass for white at such a young age, she is jealous of the

life she could have lived, the community she could have been a part of, had it not been for her

racist aunts.

Clare’s aunts whole-heartedly subscribed to white supremacy and this subscription

affected Clare in two distinct ways: Clare’s aunts forced her to pass as white but they also treated

her in the same inferior way that a white supremacist system treated African Americans. In this

way, Clare’s eventual willingness to pass as white can also be seen as a tactic of survival.

Because her aunts made her pass as white but would not allow her to marry neither white nor black suitors, Clare eventually uses passing as a means of escape from her aunts. Clare ultimately defies and subverts the tragic mulatto characteristics that have been projected onto her by Irene. Where Irene perceives Clare’s selfishness, Clare sees her own yearning to reconnect with a community that she was involuntarily severed from. In a system of white supremacy,

Clare then becomes a passing participant to secure autonomy of self but is also, in many ways, a symbol of the arbitrariness of racial categorizations. Through Larsen’s work, we see that the biracial figure’s passing reveals cracks in what appears to be a totalizing system.

The act of passing not only symbolizes the arbitrariness of racial categories but also has the potential to subvert. Clare and Irene, for example, specifically subvert spaces of white supremacy in two distinct passing roles: the spy and the ambassador. According to Minelle

Mahtani’s “Mixed Metaphors: Positioning Mixed Race Identity,” the racially ambiguous individual “can often maneuver through this racialized landscape in powerful ways” (90).

Furthermore, it is this maneuvering that “can provide a perspective from which to consider the complexities of difference” (Mahtani 89). Both Clare and Irene provide this perspective as ambassador and spy. An ambassador is also understood as a translator and/or negotiator. This position negotiates an understanding to foster lines of communication between two or more racialized groups. It is a conflict-resolution, or bridge-like, position. And although Irene expresses her lack of interest in being the bridge for Clare to reconnect with her Black heritage, she is, in some ways, the ambassador between Clare, who has made a life out of passing, and

Black Harlem. Irene brings Clare to the parties and galas that occur in Black Harlem. The spy, on the other hand, employs “covert strategies in order to move through spaces which might not be accessible to them if they proclaimed their ethnic allegiances aloud” (86). The employment of the spy position depends upon the way in which the ethnicity of the mixed race individual is perceived. These metaphors, as stated by Mahtani, run counter to the types of positions that marginalize and displace the biracial figure as other and out of place. The spy position is only employed when the identity of the mixed race figure is assumed to be one race or another. For these reasons, both Clare’s and Irene’s passing is a form of resistance in that their position of passing exposes the social construction of race in itself. To occupy this position is to undermine spaces of white supremacy. In this way, the passing position of the spy becomes a form of tactic.

As tactic, the biracial figure’s passing is not truly that of the tragic mulatto but is instead an act that presents race as an arbitrary construct, which, in turn, undermines the fractured identity of the tragic mulatto image and subverts the ridiculous notion of racial purity and the totalizing power arrangements within a system of white supremacy.

Through the accepted/rejected embracing of the characteristics that have been attributed to the tragic mulatto, the interaction between the two biracial figures, Clare and Irene, reveal race

30 as an arbitrary construct and yet still manages to create very real living conditions. The scene at the Drayton Hotel is a prime example of how the biological, or physical, definitions of race are unreliable. Irene is at the Drayton Hotel, sipping on tea, when she notices a woman who is staring at her from across the room. She tries to ignore the woman’s staring eyes but then she is roused by anger that arrives as “a small inner disturbance, [which is] odious and hatefully familiar” (7). It is within this anger that Irene begins to wonder if the woman across the room can actually tell that she, Irene, is passing. And then she immediately smites the thought that this woman, a seemingly white woman, can determine her race:

Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very

eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro? Absurd! Impossible! White people

were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were

able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger nails, palms of hands, shapes

of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a

Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gypsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even

remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro. No, the woman sitting there

staring at her couldn’t possibly know. (7-8)

And the anger that had started as a small disturbance turned into something more as “anger, scorn and fear slide over her” (8). It is within this moment that readers see race as an arbitrary construct. Both Clare and Irene are both passing for white in the midst of a white space full of white staff and customers, but Clare is also passing for white in the midst of Irene’s gaze. The interesting aspect in this situation is that everyone seems to be able to eyeball whiteness, but no one, no matter which race, can eyeball blackness. Ultimately, it is through the act of passing that

Clare reveals race as an arbitrary construct. The act of passing was a threat because it subverted

31 spaces of white supremacy by alluding to the arbitrariness of race. For Clare and Irene, their passing is not a loud and public act of subversion, but is, more or less, a personal act of subversion that transcends the ridiculous laws that dictate racial spaces.

Situating “Race” and Racisms in Space, Time, and Theory, edited by Jo-Anne Lee and

John Lutz, introduces whiteness as something that is both phenotypical and cultural. However, whiteness as a phenotype becomes negated by biracial, and/or multiracial, individuals whose observable traits align with what is socially perceived as white. It is here that race becomes a social construct built upon social perception. Race then becomes defined by the social signifiers that have been attributed to one group or another. On the one hand, Irene’s speculation defines the arbitrariness of race, and, on the other, the revelations that follow these speculations become an example of how physical characteristics are unreliable indicators of race. Here, at the

Drayton, Irene gazes upon the woman across the room and arbitrarily determines the race of the woman based on the woman’s physical appearance. However, the woman ends up being Clare.

Later in the novel, Irene has an epiphany: “appearances, she knew now, had a way sometimes of not fitting the facts” (14). Irene also describes Clare as an object to be looked at, stating “beyond the aesthetic pleasure one got from watching her, she [Clare] contributed very little” (63). Through Clare and Irene’s semiotic relationship, Irene’s gaze functions in two distinct ways: 1) Irene’s gaze works like the male gaze in that it objectifies Clare, and 2) Irene’s gaze proves to be an unreliable indicator of race. And although Irene could and was passing for white, the encounter with Clare is reflexive for Irene. It is an encounter that allows Irene to reassess her own ideas about race. She arrives at a conclusion that hints at the arbitrariness of race and begins to understand that she had bought into the notion that race was biologically determined and physically marked onto the body.

In a country that was built on the back of segregation, the mere existence of the biracial figure is a symbol that subverts and displaces the social and, many times, the legal, spheres of segregation. There were also many racially ambiguous biracial figures that could pass for white.

Clare is ultimately indefinable. Her appearance cannot be marked with certainty. When Irene gets to Clare’s letter, its “outward appearance” is described as being “out of place and alien . . . mysterious and slightly furtive” with an “almost illegible scrawl” (1). These descriptions seem to imitate Irene’s perspective of Clare. Irene describes Clare as having “an odd sort of [indefinable] smile” that “Irene couldn’t quite define” (6). Her “words were blurred” and her eyes were

“strange” (6-7). She also describes Clare as having “some quality, an intangible something too vague to define, too remote to seize” (9). For Irene, Clare is the symbol of “impermanence” (81).

She is unfixed and that which is unfixed did not have the certainty that Irene was so fond of. In fact, uncertainty was the thing that did not sit right with Irene for “it was that if which bothered her” when it pertained to Clare (13). For Irene, Clare represents the idea of race being something that is illegible, not something that can be read or felt—it is intangible. In this way, Clare can be understood as both metaphor and mediation in that she has “movement between two worlds, white and black.” To this end, Clare’s characterization is a literary displacement of the actual increasing separation of the races” (Carby 90). Clare symbolizes the indefinable facets of race,

In accordance with hooks’ work, it is within the white supremacist system that the love of blackness is a love that is perceived as a dangerous folly that is psychologically unstable.

According to hooks, a white supremacist system will always perceive the love for blackness as a threat, but Larsen’s work also presents this love for blackness as something that is perceived not only as dangerous but as psychologically unstable. Clare’s love of blackness was met with death, while Irene’s love for blackness ultimately ended with a psychotic break. As Clare shows more

and more interest in her own black heritage, Irene becomes more and more unhinged. By the end

of the novel, Irene’s anxiety reaches an all-time high. The sentences become short and choppy fragments, and Irene is described as “going mad with fear and suspicion” (84). Finally, when

Clare’s black heritage is made completely apparent to her husband, Bellew, Irene has a psychotic break and blacks out. The moment Clare plummets to her death, readers receive descriptions of

Irene: “what happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly . . . one moment Clare had been there . . . the next she was gone” (90-91). Clare’s death was concluded as “death by misadventure,” which only seems to reinforce the plot of the tragic mulatto, seeing as how misadventure is synonymous with misfortune, mishap, and/or tragedy

(94). On the one hand, Clare’s death aligns with the tragic mulatto stereotype; however, on the other hand, the moment Clare dies is the exact moment she is finally willing to fully embrace her

black heritage. In this way, Larsen’s characterization of Clare subverts the tragic mulatto, and it

is the love for blackness, not the desire of whiteness, that becomes a dangerous threat to the

power arrangements within systems of white supremacy.

If we examine Clare’s death even further, we cannot argue that she does die a tragic death

at the end of the novel, but the point worth noting is that she dies exempt from self-loathing.

Traditional scholars understand that Clare did indeed die a tragic death, but Clare also dies with a

fully actualized identity, which is not characteristic of the tragic mulatto. She is proud of her

black heritage and is willing to hang on to her heritage no matter what the cost, be it her husband

and/or child, which is not characteristic of the tragic mulatto. Through Clare’s awareness and

self-actualization, we also see bell hooks’ claim at work. A white supremacist society will not

allow black self-love, which is made evident in Clare’s death. The moment she is willing to fully

embrace and love herself, her heritage, she meets her death. In this way, the Tragic Mulatto

34 becomes myth and we, as readers, become witness to the nuance and complexity of the racially ambiguous experience within a white supremacist system.

With Clare’s death, Larsen also subverts our readerly expectation. When a raging Jack barges into the party yelling at Clare, we, as readers, assume Jack is going to explode in some way or another, and we also assume that Clare will inevitably be the target of such an explosion.

We make these assumptions because of the way Larsen builds us up to this moment. As readers, we know Jack to be a racist, and we also know Jack found out about Clare’s deception, so we, as readers, inevitably assume Clare will be emotionally, or perhaps physically, hurt by Jack, especially when he “strode towards Clare,” forcing the weight of a racial slur out of his mouth with “a snarl and a moan” (90). And Clare does indeed get hurt, but not by Jack’s doing. The one aspect of Clare’s death that is known for certain is Jack did not push Clare out of the window. In this moment, our readerly expectation is subverted, and we are left wondering about Irene.

Larsen’s work also subverts societal notions regarding the existence of interracial couples. Because it was taboo, and in some areas, illegal, for interracial couples to exist, Clare’s death, although morbid, gives way to a legal perpetuity of existence for hers and Jack’s interracial union. Clare dies, and Jack, of course, is free to remarry but will always legally remain next of kin to Clare. Although their daughter will always be a product, perhaps evidence, of their union, the daughter has no idea about her mother’s yet alone her own black heritage, so

Clare’s death becomes all the more critical. With Clare’s death, Clare and Jack’s marriage remains intact. This sort of artifact of marriage subverts the tragic mulatto characteristics in that the tragic figure is in a perpetual state of desiring a white lover. Clare, however, is married to a white man in perpetuity. Her death prevents them from obtaining a legal extermination of their union. In this way, Clare’s death subverts the legal ramifications of an interracial union during

35 the time in which this work was produced. It is almost as if Larsen’s work provides a space for an interracial union in a world that would not legally and/or socially allow such a union to exist.

Such subversion allows us to also read Larsen’s work as a sort of rewritten mimesis of the very real Rhinelander case that Larsen references in her novel. While the Rhinelander case ruled in favor of divorce, Larsen did not.

(Re)Writing Pathologies: Upending the Tragic Mulatto in The Bluest Eye

Within structures of white supremacy, blackness is at risk of erasure, and this risk is made apparent throughout Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. The novel details the tragic

life of Pecola, a young and very impressionable child. Through the narration of Claudia, Pecola’s

schoolmate and neighborhood friend, readers find Pecola, a young girl who is neglected by

nearly everyone within her immediate world. As the story unfolds, readers learn that Pecola is

ignored by her teachers. She is teased, mocked, and bullied by the kids at her school. Her father

rapes her, and her mother beats her. Although Pecola’s mother is physically present, her mother

is never emotionally present. In addition to Pecola’s tragic home life and troubled school life,

she is consistently bombarded by ideologies that specifically concern white standards of beauty.

And while many of the novel’s characters mirror Pecola’s richly dark complexion, she is teased

and taunted for that very same complexion.

In many ways, Pecola, both literally and figuratively, seems to disappear into the neglect

and abuse that surrounds her. Pecola, in this sense, seems to be experiencing what Elizabeth

Grosz describes as a body phantom:

The phantom can indeed be regarded as a kind of libidinal memorial to the lost

limb, a nostalgic tribute strongly cathected in an attempt to undermine the

perceptual awareness of its absence. It does not completely undermine the

experience of the absence of the limb but results in the phantom feeling ‘shell-

like,’ ‘empty,’ merely formal and abstract, different from the way other limbs feel

to the subject. (41)

As Pecola disappears into the neglect and abuse that is inflicted upon her, she essentially becomes a phantom body: empty and abstract. Within the confines of literal and figurative

disappearance, Pecola exhibits phantom feelings of both shell-like emptiness and abstraction.

These feelings then manifest into a longing for approximations of whiteness, as it relates to her

notions of comfort, safety, and affection.

We, as readers, see that Pecola is essentially being violated from all aspects of her life

and is never told black is beautiful—neither blatantly nor subtly. Again and again, she is told that

white (or an approximation of white) is what is beautiful, and this, along with the abuse and

neglect at home, takes a huge toll on Pecola’s psyche. Through a series of images and

occurrences, she is indirectly shown as to how whiteness resides in a world of comfort, safety,

and even affection. In a world that has repeatedly told her that she is worthless, her self-esteem, her sense of agency, is taken from her. She finds herself seemingly trapped in a social fabrication that places value in whiteness, and within this white supremacist world, she becomes hyper-fixated on wanting to be white. Morrison tells the story of the tragic thing that happens when a young, impressionable child is indirectly told that white is [supposedly] right and all else is wrong. It is the tragedy that occurs when an individual has been conditioned to believe or accept the derelict notions that a society and/or community place upon him or her. It is also the tragedy that is commonly found within the tragic mulatto stereotype.

To examine the tragic mulatto figure is to understand that there are variations of this figure. This figure ranges from the late nineteenth-century tragic mulatto—the female figure who is racially ambiguous and completely ignorant about her own black heritage until her race is outed and she is thrown into slavery—to The Birth of a Nation’s Lydia—the vamped-up, cold- hearted, man-eating, vixen who is completely aware of her black heritage but chooses to pass as white. The common thread among these variations is that the figure is always self-loathing and most certainly racially ambiguous enough to pass for what has been socially constructed as

38 white. As mentioned in the introduction, the tragic mulatto is a set of characteristics that have grown with each variation of this figure, and the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia defines the tragic mulatto by a set of varying characteristics that put an emphasis on the following personal pathologies:

self hatred, depression, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and suicide attempts. If

light enough to pass as white, she did, but passing led to deeper self-loathing. She

pitied or despised blacks and the ‘blackness’ in herself; she hated or feared whites

yet desperately sought their approval. In a race based society, the tragic mulatto

found peace only in death. She evoked pity or scorn, not sympathy.

I assert that several of these tragic mulatto characteristics can be found in the character Pecola from The Bluest Eye. Although Pecola is not racially ambiguous and cannot realistically pass for white, Pecola possess the pathological characteristics that have been attributed to the tragic mulatto stereotype. Her mother seems to despise blackness, and this disdain seems to contribute to Pecola’s extreme obsession with her wanting to be white and her fanatic longing for blue eyes.

To this end, Pecola evokes both pity and scorn from some of the neighborhood kids. However, as readers, we empathize: we just want to save this little girl from the constant abuse. Eventually

Pecola has a psychological break in which she believes her brown eyes can pass for blue; therefore, Morrison not only rewrites the ideas that revolve around this tragic mulatto type but has essentially subverted these ideas.

Scholars like Molly Hiro and Juda Bennett examine the ways in which more contemporary passing narratives upend archaic modes by which stereotypes like the tragic mulatto functioned. Although Hiro aligns with the idea that passing narratives belong solely to racially ambiguous figures, Bennett does not. Bennett finds a thread of passing narratives

throughout Morrison’s work and asserts that the passing narrative is not necessarily confined to

racially ambiguous characters. In other words, Hiro focuses on what it means to pass while

Bennett explores the constraints that delegate the notions of who can and cannot possess a

passing narrative. Both scholars, however, contribute equally important ideas.

Hiro, on one hand, examines the varying perceptions of what it means to pass. Stories of passing, such as the Imitation of Life, are confined to racially ambiguous-looking figures, and

these stories are perceived as having either an open-ended or a closed-ended conclusion. Hiro explains that the irony of the blackandwhite biracial figure is that this figure, more times than not, seems to articulate both the fixed and inescapable aspects of race. Although this figure has the potential to dispel the myth of the one-drop rule, the author asserts that this rule is so deeply ingrained in the fabrication of the United States thought and belief system that the biracial figure, especially the tragic mulatto, is often constructed to uphold the myth. For example, the racially ambiguous figure is constructed in a way that reinforces racial divides and/or categories: “the mulatto seems to be no less than the very moral dilemma of race, insofar as her choice to pass for white or to embrace ‘her’ blackness stands in for much larger ethical and political struggles around racial identity” (98). The implication here is that the tragic mulatto’s seemingly and perpetually bifurcated story only seems to serve the rigid, yet illusive, construction of race as well as the hegemony that stands in its shadows. For audiences, the tragic mulatto’s bifurcated fate was perceived as either being sealed with a life-long sadness (i.e. tragedy) or being blessed with a life-long freedom that derived from escaping the trappings enforced by a white supremacist system. It is never perceived as being both—a freedom that is wrought with sadness.

Hiro also explains, in the following passage, that these oppositional binaries have led the charge in a new wave of scholarship:

Mixed-race characters have been effectively used by black and white authors

alike to expose and deconstruct the binary logic of U.S. conceptions of race. . . .

In sum, the figure of the mulatta has the potential to challenge, rather than

reinforce, calcified racial meanings. . . . However, these arguments may

ultimately place an even heavier burden to signify racially on the proverbial

shoulders of the mulatta figure. . . . such that one begins to imagine her nearly

toppling under their weight. (99-100)

As one can see, the “mixed-race” figure, which includes the tragic mulatto, is burdened with the extensive responsibility of both moral and racial signification. Hiro explains that the weight of this burden can be seen in “Peola’s retreat from the pages of Imitation of Life . . . [which] might be read as one of her several gestures meant to refuse the signifying burden that both contemporary sociology and later literary criticism would place upon her shoulders” (100). For the purposes of this chapter, I ask that we explore the possibility that Morrison’s construction of

Pecola is a construction that is dressed in tragic mulatto characteristics as a means of deconstructing and challenging the binary logic of the United States’ concepts of race which ultimately chip away at calcified racial meanings. Within this process, Pecola collapses under the weight of a signifying burden but ultimately becomes a conduit for Claudia’s self-determination as well as her understanding of ways to love blackness in a world of white supremacy. That said,

Bennett’s work is especially critical to the exploration of this paper.

Bennett asserts that passing is a motif that weaves itself through Morrison’s body of work. To explain how Morrison rewrites the passing narrative, Bennett examines Song of

Solomon, Morrison’s short story “Recitatif,” as well as The Bluest Eye to pinpoint the ways in which Morrison’s work is “revisiting the passing narrative without surrendering to its outmoded

purposes and meanings” (213). Bennett concludes that the passing motif emerging out of

Morrison’s work is one that deconstructs and troubles the constructed lines of racial categories

and peels back hierarchies of racial hegemony. The Song of Solomon, for instance, engages a

dialogue that discusses the act of passing to assert that “the act of passing for white presents

special challenges to those who need the past . . . the history of passing, serves to remind the

reader of one of the many ways that families became cut off from their past” (209). Another

example is found in Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” in which Morrison positions each of the

characters into positions of passing. Within “Recitatif,” Morrison never actually reveals the race

of the characters but dresses each of the characters in descriptions that allude to specific racial

categories. The characters pass for whatever race the reader assumes upon them. In this way, the story ultimately “highlights the role that language plays in determining who we are and how others react to us” (214). However, it is ultimately Bennett’s interpretation of The Bluest Eye that has prompted my own scholarly endeavors.

Although the image of the passing figure is an image that is traditionally racially ambiguous looking, Bennett’s work reconstructs our notion that concerns the physical appearance of the types of figures that conventionally possess the passing narrative. In other

words, Bennett deconstructs our notions of the passing narrative by reconstructing our notion of

what the passing figure physically looks like. For Bennett, The Bluest Eye provides readers with

exactly that, a passing figure that does not physically look like the traditional passing figure.

Bennett explains that “through the dark-skinned Pecola, Morrison reconstructs the passing figure as its visual opposite.” In Bennett’s interpretation, the light-skinned Maureen Peal only works to

reconfirm Pecola as the reconstructed passing figure in that “it is the light-skinned Maureen who

reveals Pecola’s connection with the traditional passing figure, Peola, a character from a Fannie

Hurst novel . . . The Imitation of Life” (207). For these reasons, I ask that we not only examine

the ways in which Pecola embodies and upends the tragic mulatto characteristics but that we also

examine the ways in which Pecola collapses under the weight of this signifying burden,

ultimately becoming a conduit to Claudia’s potential to challenge conceptions of race and their

archaic meanings.

Maureen’s appearance in the novel, although limited, makes it clear to see Morrison’s rewriting of the tragic mulatto. Maureen is the first to see that Pecola’s name is similar to Peola,

the tragic mulatto, from the film adaptation (1934) of Fannie Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life. In

fact, in the following passage, Maureen believes that Pecola is the name of the tragic mulatto in

the film. As the girls are walking to the ice cream shop, Maureen turns to Pecola and says

“Pecola. Wasn’t that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life?” (Morrison 67). Pecola has no idea

about the film, so Maureen says “you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother because

she is black and ugly but then cries at the funeral. It was real sad. Everybody cries in it”

(Morrison 67). But Maureen does not seem to have a grasp on what the film was actually about.

In all actuality, the film represents blackness in a way that reinforces white dominance. The

film’s representations of blackness are essentially built by white constructions of blackness.

In Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,

Morrison discusses the ways in which African American peoples, in literature, have been

characterized by a Eurocentric gaze. Morrison calls this characterization “Africanism”: it is “a

term for the denotative and connotative blackness African peoples have come to signify, as well

as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreading that characterize these

peoples in Eurocentric eyes” (1792). However, she further states that “it may be possible to

discover, through a close look at literary ‘blackness,’ the nature and even the source of literary

‘whiteness’” (1792). With this in mind, I believe Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye becomes a response to Imitation of Life. While the latter is a white construction of blackness, the former,

Morrison’s novel, is black construction of the way white supremacy builds up constructs of blackness. Morrison also explains that “the fabrication of an Africanistic persona was reflexive; it was an extraordinary meditation on the self, a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness, an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity” (1793). However, Morrison’s novels seem to reclaim these types of

Africanistic personas. She shifts the gaze. The persona is reflexive but is no longer constructed by a Eurocentric gaze. In The Bluest Eye, we, as readers, see Pecola through Claudia’s lens, and through this lens, we see an “exploration of the fears and desires” that reside in each of the character’s consciousness. Her narrative shatters what Morrison calls the master narrative, a narrative that silenced the Africanistic persona and upheld a façade that promoted the “innocence of Americanness” (1799). The Bluest Eye shatters this idea of “innocence.” Readers are faced with a body of work that “illustrates and represents the transformation of biological, ideological, and metaphysical concepts of racial differences” (1800). In this way, Morrison’s work embodies the gaze of opposition. According to bell hooks’ “Oppositional Gaze,” the tragic mulatto character, whose name was Peola, was a character that was both loved and feared. Hooks described Imitation of Life as the first time she was able to develop an oppositional gaze, a critical gaze, and writes about it as follows:

There was something scary in this image of young sexual sensual black beauty

betrayed—that daughter that did not want to be confined by blackness, that ‘tragic

mulatto’ who did not want to be negated. ‘Just let me escape this image forever,’

she could have said. I will always remember that image. I remembered how we

cried for her, for our unrealized desiring selves. She was tragic because there was

no place in the cinema for her, no loving pictures. She too was an absent image. It

was better then, that we were absent, or when we were there it was humiliating,

strange, sad. We cried all night for you, for the cinema that had no place for you.

And like you, we stopped thinking it would one day be different. (312-13)

In this quote, hooks has a few different realizations. First, hooks sees her unrealized desires in

Peola. Second, for hooks, the tragedy was that racially ambiguous women like this particular figure did not have a loving space within cinema. And third, hooks began to understand that

“cinematic racism [is the] . . . violent erasure of black womanhood” (310). In Maureen’s descriptions of Peola, she is not only promoting the erasure of black womanhood in cinema, but both she and Pecola are also promoting the erasure of black girlhood. Unbeknownst to Maureen,

Pecola has been erasing herself.

At one point, Pecola asks God to make her disappear, and suddenly, “little parts of her body faded away . . . her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow . . . the legs all at once . . . . Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left”

(45). When this passage is read in accordance with the Imitation of Life references, Morrison suggests the erasure of black women from both literature and cinema. Just as hooks witnessed

Peola’s “violent erasure of black womanhood, we, as readers, witness the same abstract erasure with Pecola. To resist this type of erasure, hooks suggests an oppositional gaze. And although hooks is referring to cinema, both Claudia and Frieda demonstrate this oppositional gaze.

Although Claudia and Frieda are bombarded by many of the same white supremacist ideologies as Pecola, they continue to resist and reject these ideologies, partly because of their family structure and partly due to the ways in which Pecola cannot resist and reject. When we examine

45 the home lives of the girls, we see that both Claudia and Frieda are seemingly safe and protected in the comfort of their homes. Pecola does not have a safe and protected home life, and she also does not know how to resist and reject ideologies of white supremacy. In fact, Pecola is somewhat of a reflection of her mother, Pauline. Hooks explicitly states that “in her first novel,

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison constructs a portrait of the black female spectator; her gaze is the masochistic look of victimization . . . . To experience pleasure, Miss Pauline sitting in the dark

(theater) must imagine herself transformed, turned into the white woman portrayed on the screen” (312). Rather that engaging the film with an oppositional gaze, Pauline essentially mimics what she sees on film.

Pauline’s favorite films construct blackness as an uninteresting, undesirable and/or as an absent presence, and this devaluing that cinema has attributed to blackness seems to be imprinted on Pauline’s notion of blackness, which then begins to define her notion of self and is eventually passed on to her daughter, Pecola. For instance, when Pauline’s history is revealed, we see that she went from being desirable to undesirable. The physical attraction, or desirability, between her and her husband eventually unravels into an asexual marriage. Pauline literally becomes the sort of asexual mammy-like figure that she sees in cinema. Pecola, on the other hand, inherits the notion of blackness as absent and/or uninteresting. She longs to be of interest to her family and peers and just wants to be acknowledged, but she feels invisible to the world, as if she cannot be acknowledged/looked at even if someone wanted to acknowledge her because she believes the notion that Hollywood cinema “constructs our [black] presence as absence” (hooks 310). This notion of absence or erasure has been passed down from Pauline to

Pecola and is reflected in Pecola’s wish to become invisible, which is ultimately the byproduct of being seen as ugly when she is, in fact, noticed. In this sense, both Pecola and Peola represent

46 the erasure of black womanhood from both film and cinema but, more specifically, from a white supremacist system where white standards of beauty are prioritized and reign supremacy.

These two characters, Pecola and Peola, hope for different outcomes but are on the same road. Both characters participate in this erasure; however, it is the mothers that seem to have different positions. As the traditional tragic mulatto figure, Peola despises her own blackness and spends her entire life running away from her black mother, trying to pass for white. It is only when her mother, a mammy-like figure, passes away that Peola expresses regret about having spent her entire life running away from her own mother, who offered unwavering love and acceptance. Pecola, on the other hand, spends her young life hoping for blue eyes because she believes that this longing for whiteness will give her beauty and provide her with comfort and safety and, above all, her mother’s love and acceptance. Her self-loathing takes the form of an inferiority-complex. She believes that her blackness is the aspect of self that has made her exempt from love/affection and safety. For this reason, she believes that the ability to morph into an approximation of whiteness will secure the love/affection and safety she is not given.

Ultimately, Pecola has learned how to be complicit in her own erasure.

In many ways, erasure is a critical concept when understanding the tragic mulatto stereotype for the tragedy is the erasure in which the “mulatto” seeks. The tragic mulatto essentially erases blackness in the pursuit to, at times, not only pass as white but be white. We see this aspect in Pecola. When the characterization of Pecola is examined, her longing for blue eyes is essentially a metonym. The only time we, as readers, receive images of blue eyes, the blue eyes are always accompanied by blond hair and alabaster skin; therefore, her metonym- longing for the bluest of eyes is in all actuality a longing for whiteness. This longing is clearly displayed in Pecola’s extremely fanatic obsession with the Mary Jane candies:

Each pale yellow wrapper has a picture on it. A picture of little Mary Jane, for

whom the candy is named. Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue

eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant,

mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its

sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane.

Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane. Three pennies had brought her nine lovely

orgasms with Mary Jane. (50)

With these descriptions, the blue eyes seem to stand in for “white face . . . blond hair . . . a world

of comfort . . . pretty . . . sweetness . . . good” (50). When Pecola consumes the Mary Jane

candy, she is essentially eating her idea of the other. It is an internalization of the white

supremacist ideals represented by the other, which, for Pecola, does not so much include a hatred

of self but an inferiority-complex toward her own blackness. According to bell hooks Outlaw

Culture, the eating of the other is a type of cultural appropriation. Bodies, even narratives, are molded “like clay—there to be shaped so that they become anything” (68-69). In other words,

the eating of the other “mirrors that of colonialism” (hooks 69). In the United States of America,

where colonialism has positioned people of color as “other,” people of color learned how to

position people of non-color as other. Because Pecola is a product of the environment in which

she resides, she has learned how to other. For little Pecola, whiteness, or the approximation of

whiteness, is an “other,” and for her to eat the other is, in her mind, a way for her to be

something other than herself. In a world that seems to place comfort, safety, love, and affection

with approximations of whiteness, Pecola believes these necessities can be obtained by the

erasure of self (i.e. her blackness). Although we, readers, witness Pecola eat her idea of the other

(e.g. the Mary Jane candy), what she masochistically wants is for the “other” to consume her. In

an effort to erase her blackness, she wants to be consumed by anything and everything that she

considers white; milk, Shirley Temple, and, of course, the Mary Janes, all of which just a

metonym for alabaster skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. However, what Pecola fails to realize is

that the metonyms she desires are just placeholders for the necessities that both her mother and

father have failed to give her.

In addition to this idea of eating the other, Morrison also allows readers to explore the

different values that have been socially attributed to whiteness. In Pecola’s painful world full of

voided-sweetness, consistent abuse, perpetual neglect, and exempted-good, she seeks the world of comfort that seems to be infinite for the “white face . . . blond hair” Mary Jane (50). In

Pecola’s mind, eating the candy is a way to “be Mary Jane” (50). Pecola wants blue eyes because she thinks that having blue eyes will make her white, and she wants to be white because in her world there are reoccurring images and communal notions that associate whiteness, or any approximation of whiteness, with being sweet and good and beautiful and, ultimately, safe inside a bubble of comfort. For Pecola, being white translates into the worthiness of being loved, valued, and accepted. This longing to be white ultimately mimics that of the tragic mulatto.

For reasons that are not within Pecola’s control, she begins to pity her own blackness She believes that being white will negate this feeling of pity; however, her longing for whiteness is also complicated by a few of the other tragic mulatto characteristics. For example, Pecola has not only learned how to pity her own blackness, but she has also created a sort of fetish that revolves around whiteness. For Pecola, whiteness is a substitute for safety, protection, comfort, and care, and Pecola’s Mary Jane candies are a substitution for whiteness. In this way, her true desire is buried in mini-series of metonyms, and eating the Mary Jane candy is described as having “nine lovely orgasms” (50). When the word “orgasm” is examined, the term originated from the Greek

49 word “organ,” which means to swell or be excited. When this definition is applied to Morrison’s descriptions of Pecola eating the Mary Jane candies is essentially a metonym for whiteness; therefore, she is excited to eat the candy. And because Pecola feels inferior, the act of swelling, or enlarging, works against this feeling of inferiority.

The description of the Mary Jane candy also seems to reveal the dichotomized feelings that many tragic mulatto variations seem to have about whiteness. Pecola fanatically admires— idolizes and unknowingly has a fetish for—Mary Jane’s whiteness, yet she describes this whiteness as something that is petulant; bad-tempered and disgruntled. Because the blue eyes are a metonym for whiteness, the petulant description is an indication that Pecola perceives the eyes, or whiteness, as something to fear, even as she admires and idolizes the very same eyes. This type of admiration yet fear dichotomy is further explored when Maureen Peal steps into the scene. Maureen is admired by everyone: “she enchanted the entire school” (62). Her laugh is

“sweet” (70). And Morrison describes Maureen as “a high-yellow dream child . . . . swaddled in comfort and care” (62). This “high-yellow” descriptor is a figurative reference to skin-tone.

Within black communities, high-yellow loosely translates to being fair-skinned. High-yellow is also a connotation for racial ambiguity. In this case, Maureen is also described as a “dream child,” who seems to leave the implication that whiteness, as well as approximations of whiteness, are treated to more comfort and more care. With this interpretation, Maureen is described as a “dream child” because Maureen has an unearned privilege within this white supremacist structure thus she is, or rather she has, the dream: privilege.

In this way, Maureen Peal essentially becomes a physical manifestation of the Mary Jane candies; petulant but sweet with a face that stares out at you from a world of comfort. Mary Jane and Maureen Peal even have a similar sound in that Mary (Ma•ry) and Maureen (Maur•een) both

50 follow an unstressed/stressed syllabic pattern. What follows is the clunk of a last name with one- syllable: Jane, for Mary, and Peal, for Maureen. In this way, Morrison’s diction draws a direct parallel between the whiteness of Mary Jane and the approximation of whiteness perceived in

Maureen Peal. Pecola wants to be white like Mary Jane, and Maureen Peal is the closest approximation of white within her proximity, thus Maureen Peal becomes a manifestation of

Mary Jane. When Pecola interacts with Maureen Peal, the manifestation of Mary Jane, she is rejected. In fact, Maureen not only rejects Pecola but also rejects Claudia, and Frieda. While

Claudia and Frieda reciprocate Maureen’s rejection. Pecola does not. Instead, Pecola seems to collapse into herself. In this way, Maureen represents the ideologies that place value on approximations of whiteness. Both Claudia and Frieda know how to reject this ideology, but

Pecola does not.

The similarities between Mary Jane and Maureen Peal also reveal the dichotomous feelings the candies evoked in Pecola. In describing Maureen, Claudia reveals “Frieda and I were bemused, irritated, and fascinated by her” (63). The girls seem to reject and accept her all at once, until, finally, Claudia has an epiphany:

Dolls we could destroy, but we could not destroy the honey voices of parents and

aunts, the obedience of our teachers when they encountered the Maureen Peals of

the world . . . and all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and

not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her

beautiful, and not us. (74)

Maureen Peal was not the thing that was admired and feared; it was the dominating ideologies that they feared and admired. Later, the girls end up in an argument, and Maureen tells the girls that they are “black and ugly,” which cements Maureen’s position as an ideological

manifestation but also reconfirms the way Pecola feels about her own blackness (73). Here,

Maureen’s assertion is and is not a reflection of the tragic mulatto. The traditional tragic mulatto

figure despises blackness, which eventually produces self-loathing because the tragic mulatto not

only despises blackness in other people but also despises her own black heritage. Although

Maureen yells out this atrocity at Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, Maureen is never really portrayed

as self-loathing. But Pecola is.

Pecola does not despise blackness; however, she is self-loathing. In many ways, Maureen has all the physical, and, perhaps, superficial aspects of the tragic mulatto, but it is Pecola who suffers from the pathological, perhaps psychical characteristics of the tragic mulatto. In this moment, Pecola “seemed to fold into herself” and Claudia becomes angered, asserting “her

[Pecola’s] pain antagonized me” (73). Claudia explains, “I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets” (72-73). With this quote, Claudia expresses the anger she feels toward

Pecola’s inability to resist the adoption of hateful statements expressed by Maureen. Claudia wants Pecola to resist the hatred espoused by Maureen because Maureen is actually just an ideological manifestation of white supremacy. When Claudia sees Pecola’s inability to reject this ideology, it evokes a fear that there might come a day when Claudia herself might not be able to evade these types of hateful ideologies. In this way, Pecola not only adopts a self-loathing view but the pain that is solicited from adopting this view evokes both scorn and pity, not sympathy, from Claudia and Frieda. For these reasons, Pecola is the epitome of the tragic mulatto characterization.

In this way, Claudia’s anger reveals Pecola’s collapse under the weight of being a

“signifying burden” (Hiro 100). In the moments building up to Claudia’s reaction, Maureen

appears to readers as a racially ambiguous figure with the potential to possess tragic mulatto

characteristics and a passing narrative; however, this narrative is subtly transferred to Pecola

when Maureen draws a direct connection between Pecola and Peola. Moments later, Maureen

literally vanishes from the text, or perhaps Peola is a signifier for the tragic mulatto and Maureen

vanishes into the signifier. Either way, we, readers are only left with the paralleled similarities

between Pecola, the young girl with a longing for blue eyes, and Peola, the tragic mulatto who

possesses a passing narrative.

However, it is Pecola’s psychological break that seems to cement Pecola as the

unconventional tragic mulatto, proving that if the erasure does not occur, then a fractured identity will. Morrison’s image of this fractured identity is little Pecola carrying out full conversations with herself, “head jerking . . . elbows bent, hands on shoulders” (204). It is within this heartbreaking moment that the passing narrative occurs. When she is pushed into her psychotic break, her belief that her brown eyes are blue can be understood in two different ways: 1) the blue eyes, as stated earlier, remain a metonym for whiteness, and in this moment, Pecola whole- heartedly believes she has acquired this whiteness and can, therefore, pass as white to anyone who encounters her; or 2) Pecola does not believe she is white but she does believe she has acquired the blue-eyed approximation of whiteness. Either way, Pecola’s psychotic break reveals her as both the oppressed and the oppressor. Because she has adopted a set of oppressive beliefs, she has ultimately locked her into an oppressed state. She is the only one who sees her brown eyes as blue; therefore, she is both the one who is willing to pass and the audience that she wants to pass for. In this moment, Pecola also develops a doubled or split personality in which she psychically splinters into a sort of schizophrenic frenzy.

As per Lacan’s mirror stage, this particular stage is critical to a healthy development of ego and occurs at a very young age in which the individual expresses a need for spatial identification, which, in turn, satisfies the need for self-identification, for what is spatial identification of the space that surrounds the self without self-identification. With the lure of spatial identification, the perceived insufficiency of reality and the perceived anticipation of fantasy “extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality” or Ideal-I image (Lacan

506). In this way, the body is not only socially marked but is also self-marked perhaps in a way that rigidly structures the mental development of the subject. And this stage is transformative through the span of an individual’s life. As individuals, we are consistently marking, retracting, and marking our egos with markers of identification. To this end, we, as individuals, seem to be in a perpetual negotiation as to how we see ourselves in the world, and ultimately “the mirror stage functions to ‘establish a relation between the organism and its reality’” (Lacan qtd. in

Grosz 39). Grosz explains this negotiation in the following terms: “The imaginary anatomy is an internalized image or map of the meaning that the body has for the subject, for others in its social world, and for the symbolic order conceived in its generality (that is, for a culture as a whole). It is an individual and collective fantasy of the body’s forms and modes of action” (39-40). The

“totalized image” of self, the “imaginary anatomy,” the “body phantom” are achieved during the early stages of childhood by way of the mirror stage, and “although it [the imaginary, the phantom] will undergo modifications and transformations throughout the child’s life, [the imaginary anatomy or body phantom] will nevertheless derive its stability (or lack of it) from the earliest stages of the child’s self-representations” (Grosz 42). As we see with Pecola’s rather tragic Ideal-I, this imaginary image changes from whole to fragmented: the latter a reflection of her own fragmented body image, inner turmoil, and psychical chaos. Lacan explains that the

54 fragmented body has a tendency to reveal itself in dreams but also states that “this form is even tangibly revealed at the organic level, in the lines of ‘fragilization’ that define the anatomy of phantasy [sic], as exhibited in the schizoid and spasmodic symptoms of hysteria” (Lacan 506).

As seen in the double effect in which Pecola splits and begins bickering with herself, it is this type of schizoid or splintered fragilization that is exhibited by Pecola. Grosz explains this doubling in doppelganger terms in which extreme depersonalization occurs in a state of psychosis:

The body feels as if it has been taken over by others or is controlled by outside

forces. When autoscopy occurs, the subject may see itself as it were from the

outside or may be haunted by the most terrifying of images, the Doppelganger.

Autoscopy is commonly preceded by depersonalization in epileptic seizures, and

in this case the subject may experience itself as outside its own boundaries,

looking on in a detached manner. Here the phantom appears in bright and vivid

detail, and may be perceived not only visually but also in auditory and tactile

terms, as if emotionally and kinesthetically attached to the subject. (43)

Pecola seems to be a prime example of autoscopy in which she is not only haunted by a sort of taunting and placating doppelganger but, as we see in the “head jerks,” she is also suffering from a series of involuntary, seizure-like bodily movements.

This moment also displays the fractured or split aspect that is commonly attributed to the tragic mulatto figure. Traditionally, the biracial aspect of the tragic mulatto figure is presented as a fracturing of the figure’s identity. The biracial identity of the traditional tragic mulatto is distorted and re-presented as something that is split between two worlds: black and white.

Pecola, as tragic mulatto, obliterates the bifurcated stance that is perpetually aligned with the

tragic mulatto and its varied renderings, and asks readers to explore the tragic mulatto as a

symptom that is not necessarily aligned with racial ambiguity but as a symptom of white

supremacy, in general. In this way, the existence of blackness within a system of white

supremacy is always at-risk of bearing tragic mulatto symptoms.

Pecola’s destructive outcome is equivalent to the ways in which the tragic mulatto, in a passing narrative, faces punishment for the desire of whiteness but can also be understood as the ways in which the tragic mulatto, and/or mixed-race figure, topples under the burdened weight of both moral and racial signification. Although Pecola is the only one who perceives her brown eyes as blue, which is a metonym for whiteness, her perception is symptomatic of the tragic mulatto’s passing narrative and therefore comes with a tragic cost. In Pecola’s case, the cost— the tragedy— is mental degeneration.

While the traditional tragic mulatto figure is displayed as the embodiment of a splintered racial identity, Pecola and her doppelganger become representative of the tragic mulatto’s splintered, or bifurcated, identity. The tragedy of the tragic mulatto was that she was only able to find peace in death, and Pecola follows this plotline. For Pecola, peace is found in her perceived ability to embody, or pass as, an approximation of whiteness; for readers, Pecola’s degenerative perception is death. Ultimately, Pecola, just as the biracial, or mixed-race, figure who bears the weight of tragic mulatto, topples under the weight of signification. Pecola is not only a signification of the tragic mulatto as a means of upending this stereotypical trope but the way in which she embodies the pathological traits of the tragic mulatto figure is also a signification of the many ways that blackness, within a white supremacist society, is always at high-risk of psychical and/or corporeal death.

Recuperating and Resuscitating: (Re)Claiming the Biracial Figure and Black Female Subjectivity

In this chapter, I will explore ekphrastic writing as an approach to recall, remember, re-

member, and repair history. I will also examine ekphrastic works of mixed-media literature and

ultimately offer ekphrasis as an approach to resurrecting black female subjectivity from historical

erasure. As a reparative approach, ekphrasis works not only to prohibit erasure but also to push

us to examine the pseudo-rigidness of racial classifications and trope-like boundaries, while simultaneously resuscitating historically ignored subjectivities. The significance in preserving such subjectivities provides a humanizing, and more realistic, view of what it meant to be black and woman. In this way, ekphrastic methods provide the literary space for diverse black female subjectivities that otherwise may not have been acknowledged. These representations of subjectivity not only work to serve us a more profound understanding of the past but also contribute to our understanding of racial difference in the present as we move forward into the future. Although there are critics who discuss ekphrasis in relation to Robin Coste Lewis’

Voyage of the Sable Venus and Bellocq’s Ophelia by Natasha Tretheway, I offer ekphrasis as an

approach that prohibits and resuscitates the erasure of embodied subjectivities pertaining to black

female figures and encourages us to acknowledge both the diverse and intersectional identities of

black women.

Dedicated to the resurrection of what would be the erasure of the black, or African

American, female figure from Western history, Lewis’ work is a collection of poetry that includes “a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present” (35). In this way,

Lewis’ work reads like an ekphrastic timeline that recalls the diverse black body and re-members

the way art, throughout history, has provided redundant stereotypes and trope-like

representations of black women. Claudia Rankine explains, “This title poem [“Voyage of the

Sable Venus”] upends the language of representation, collected from the cataloging of the black

body in Western art. Robin Coste Lewis takes back depictions of the black feminine and refuses

to land or hold down that which has always been alive and loving and lovely.” The result is a

more realistic representation of historical black subjectivities.

Equally important is the discovery Lewis made while tending to her work. The writer quickly realized that many museums and libraries had erased historical-markers from the works

of art. Markers “such as slave, colored, and negro” were erased from their archives, and these

words were replaced by “the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid, African American” (35). With

this discovery, Lewis explains that she took liberties that were not liberties at all:

In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well intended), I re-

erased the postmodern African-American, then changed those titles back. That is,

I re-corrected the corrected horror in order to allow the original horror to stand.

My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but

also how normative and complicit artists, curators, and art institutions have been

in participating in—if not creating—this history. (35)

In other words, Lewis employs erasure to prevent the erasure of the way black bodies were treated, perceived, and marked throughout history. In this way, the poet author’s discovery ultimately underscores the critical significance of and need for more ekphrastic works like

Voyage of the Sable Venus. For these reasons, I also examine Tretheway’s collection.

Lewis primarily bases her ekphrastic poetry on transcription while Tretheway’s ekphrastic writing revolves around research. In other words, the work from Tretheway is the product of trying to understand the trials and tribulations of an unnamed woman in a particular

portrait. In Tretheway’s work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, readers find a collection of poems inspired by

an unnamed woman in a Blue Book photograph taken by E.J. Bellocq. These works, from both

Lewis and Tretheway, not only unearth the erasure of black female subjectivity but also bring the

diversity of black female subjectivity out from the depths of historical erasure to the forefront of

poetic-fictions.

Before proceeding, however, I would like to give some attention to the ekphrastic technique and what that means to the purposes of this exploratory scholarship. Although ekphrasis is a technique that is commonly employed in poetry, it is ultimately understood as a means of storytelling. It is, more specifically, a research-based approach to storytelling.

According to the Poetry Foundation, ekphrasis revolves around description in that it is “through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.” Ekphrasis is essentially a process in which art produces art, by way of the writer, of course. In other words, it is a technique that expands on the meaning of a particular piece of artwork; however, my research shows us that ekphrastic works cannot only reframe histories in ways that poke holes in what we thought we knew but also provide a variety of platforms and spaces for voices that may not have been heard and stories that may not have been told otherwise.

Lewis employs this reframing approach and describes the Voyage of the Sable Venus, the ekphrastic poem which titles the book, as “a narrative poem compromised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present” (35). The result is a series of images that create a sort of fragmented timeline of

Black American History, and a line which seems to mirror the concept of fragmentation that shows up in American Black history can be found in the lines that read “Untitled Anonymous

Memory / (the Shape of Things) . . . The Liberation / of Aunt Jemima Dancing at the Louvre!”

(104). In this way, Lewis’ ekphrastic approach does not put words to an image but instead is one

in which she is somewhat of a transcriber of words, and it is in this transcription that images

appear and a translation occurs. Her approach is somewhat of an adaptation of ekphrasis, and it is

through this approach that the poet can represent, or re-present, the Westernized history of black

women. In gathering the various titles, captions, and descriptions of other art works, the poet

provides readers with distinct images of fragmented bodies and objectified women. In doing so,

the onslaught of fragmented and objectified images allows readers to re-contextualize Black

American history. These images reveal the horrifying and fragmented depths as well as the resiliency in Black American history, which provides readers with the space to recall, remember, and re-member, or piece back together, the erased, or glossed-over, formations of Black

American history.

In addition to Lewis’ aforementioned discovery, in which there was a historical erasure of slavery, Lewis also discovered how black female figures were artistically used in ways that were unbeknownst to Lewis. The ways in which these women were used included but were not limited to objects that breached artistically canonized mediums. For this reason, the poet author, as explained in the following passage, had to examine unconventional works that were not recognized by the Western canon of historical art:

‘Art’ included paintings, sculpture, installations, photography, lithographs,

engravings, any work on paper, et cetera—all those traditional mediums now

recognized by the Western art-historical canon. However, because black female

figures were also used in ways I could never have anticipated, I was forced to

expand that definition to include other material and visual objects, such as combs,

spoons, buckles, pans, knives, table legs. (35)

Furthermore, Lewis also encountered many images of black women who appeared to be passing

as white; however, their passing seemed to go unnoticed in the Western art world, so the poet

took the liberty of including these works of seemingly white women who, to her, appeared to be

black women only passing as white. The culmination of these found words, attached to works of

art, that have been pieced together, image by image, not only provide readers with a new, and

perhaps a more authentic or realistic, historical perspective but also a revelation of the historical atrocities that have painted, molded, and/or glossed over the depiction of black female figures in the Western art world. In other words, Lewis’ intent is to reveal that which has been archived into erasure.

Upon reading Lewis’ work, readers will immediately see that fragmentation becomes a reoccurring concept. The pieced together images are fragments—both literally and figuratively— which illustrate how the lack of documentation becomes a form of historical erasure. This erasure becomes brutally apparent in lines like “Statuette of a Black Slave Girl / Right Half of

Body and Head Missing / Head of a Young Black Woman Fragment” (43). These two lines provide snap shot images of both absent and fragmented body parts. The head is either missing or fragmented, and these images lend themselves to the ways men and women are philosophically portrayed as sets of dichotomous binaries in which male/female becomes mind/body. Although the male is absent, these images of women, even the girl, are images that either fragment or omit the head, or mind, and leave us with descriptions that solely allude to the body when referencing, or describing, these women. The absence of the head is then a symbolic reference in which the mind is absent from the body. Lewis’ work isolates these particular

61 images, which only serves to heighten this particular absence as a means of featuring that which has been erased. Through this absence, we see that black women have not only been historically reduced to body but have also been reduced to fragmented parts of the body.

In accordance with Elizabeth Grosz’s work on corporeal feminism, the mind has been privileged in the explanation of reality as well as the acquisition of knowledge, truth, and justice; however, the body is equally important in the pursuit of this acquisition because, as Grosz states,

“I am not able to stand back from the body and its experiences to reflect on them; this withdrawal is unable to grasp my body-as-it-is-lived-by-me. I have access to knowledge of my body only by living it” (86). The body shapes experience and experience informs perspective; therefore, the mind is that which is embodied: the mind is an embodied mind. In other words, there is a symbiotic connection, or interrelatedness, between the mind and body—neither the mind nor the body can function alone but instead are interconnected. To that end, the fragmented images that we find in Lewis’ work invoke the need for “embodied subjectivity” (Grosz 22).

With this type of embodied subjectivity, Lewis’ fragmented images of body move beyond psychical explanations of reality and offer alternative ways of thinking about the construction of subjectivity in and of itself. The poet author’s process ultimately works to highlight the perception of black women during slavery, and just as the head appears “missing” or fragmented in the previous passage from Lewis, this perception solely revolved around the body.

This fragmented subject is also accompanied by a series of fragmented narratives. An example of fragmented narrative can be found in lines like “ship negro woman seated. / at right, slavers throwing over” (73). Here, the subject is not fragmented, but readers are given a fragmented narrative to piece together. In other words, there are parts of this scene that have been omitted, such as the fact that this “Ship Negro Woman” was probably shackled to her seat.

In fact, it is highly likely that this woman did not even have a seat but was shackled and bound to a pile of bodies, or if she did have a seat, she was probably tightly packed and squished into a seat that held more bodies than it could fit. As for the “Slavers,” the description does not detail exactly what, or in accordance with what we know of black history in America, who is being thrown. With what we, as readers, know of Black American history, the “Slavers” are most likely throwing shackled black bodies “over[board].” The omission, or fragmentation, of these details ultimately engages with the reader in a way that places the responsibility of recalling and re-membering Black American history onto the reader.

This idea of the fragment is also immediately pronounced in Lewis’s use of punctuation.

Lewis’ employment of punctuation, like the em-dash, is rather conventional but nonetheless fragmentary; for instance, the em-dash is used in a way that provides fragmented pieces of information, such as the line “The Slave watching / her pursuers in for e—” (71). However, the colon in particular seems to be stylistically employed in somewhat of an unconventional way. In some ways, the colon seems to be a marker that separates each poem into sections. Lewis, for example, employs the colon to spill the reader into each page of her work. Many of Lewis’ poems begin with a simple colon in the upper left hand corner of the page. The placement of this particular punctuation mark allows the poet to make use of the entire page, but the mark stands alone and is separated from the text on the page, which causes somewhat of a fragmented appearance that seems to mirror the documented fragments of black American history.

Lewis’ work also features diverse representations of the black body, which is made apparent in descriptions such as “Negro/Negress,” “Yellow Negro,” “Coloured,” “Octoroon,”

“Mulatto,” as well as “Mulatress African” and is alluded to in descriptors such as “Unidentified”

63 and “Untitled.” Readers are almost immediately introduced to these representations with the following lines:

In the Window Negress with

Flower Sleeping Woman

(Negress with Flower Head

of a Woman-Nude in a Land

scape) — Libyan Sybil: Coloured, Nude-High

Yellow Negro Woman

and Two Children — The Flight

of the Octoroon: the Four Quarters of

the World, Holding

a Celestial Sphere (38-9)

Within these lines, there are specific phrases, such as “the Four Quarters of the World,” that allude to the diversity within the black community. If we were to take this phrase in the most literal sense, the world would be divided into four quarters, or ¼ parts; however, with the context of the poem the four quarters seem to be the four different references to blackness that come before this particular phrase: “Negress . . . Coloured . . . Yellow Negro . . . Octoroon.” While

“Negress” and “Coloured” are known as general references of blackness, terms like “High

Yellow Negro . . . [and] Octoroon” seem to be signifiers that suggest and delineate blood quantum as it pertains to percentages of “black” blood but ultimately allude to a set of traits such as skin tone. These signifiers of skin tone are made even more so apparent when “the Window

Negress” is juxtaposed with the “Yellow Negro Woman” and “the Octoroon.” While the term yellow obviously evokes a complexion with yellow-undertones, the latter, “octoroon,” evokes an

image of a complexion that is fair-skinned. Lewis’ use of these particular titles superficially

presents several different signifiers for blackness; however, these terms are, in fact, historical-

markers for eras of extreme oppression, such as slavery and the Jim Crow period that followed.

These historical markers for blackness and skin-tone are ever more apparent in phrases like

“Half-Length Portrait of a Mulatto Girl” (Lewis 86). The way the term “mulatto” is presented in this particular context is meant to evoke a specific skin tone just as the “The Mulatress African

Woman with basket Kongo Basket” phrase evokes an image of a specific black complexion.

Would this description evoke the same image without the word “Mulatress”? Perhaps not.

Although the term “Mulatress” originated in 17th century France in which the -tresse suffix was

the feminine counterpart to the male mulâtre, the term, which showed up in America during the

19th century, does not seem to allude to nationality as much as it does skin tone (OED Online).

Altogether, these descriptors are meant to allude to historical markers of blackness, and they do,

but the descriptions also evoke different complexions of skin tone, which ultimately reifies the

way we, as a society, have not only perpetuated racial categories but also approximations to

whiteness.

Because Lewis’ work transcribes captions of Western art pertaining to depictions of

African American peoples, Lewis transcribed many stereotypes, but the poet author manages to

thread out images that upend these stereotypes in the way that she weaves her found words. For

example, there is an image of a “Negro Woman Seated / at a table, facing / left, writing / with a

quill” during slavery, a time in which reading and writing, for black people who were enslaved,

was prohibited (77). We, as readers, are also privy to images like the “Seated Negro Woman

Looking / to the left, drawing,” which is black resiliency during a time of most extreme

oppression (71). However, when I focus on the “yellow . . . octoroon . . . mulatto” figures in

Lewis’ work, this figure is rarely mentioned as “yellow,” “octoroon,” or “mulatto,” and it is not because these figures do not exist in the canon of Western art. This particular absence, or erasure, leads me to believe that these figures are, in fact, mentioned but are not consistently described in the aforementioned terms. In many ways, it seems that the biracial, multiracial, or racially ambiguous figures within Lewis’ work are described as either unidentified, untitled, and/or are described in accordance with the one drop rule. In this way, these “octoroon,”

“mulatto,” et cetera descriptions were never really put in place to allude to percentages of black

“blood” heritage nor did these descriptions ever really allude to skin tone, at least not in the white imagination; instead, it was just a complicated way of saying “not white,” a way of placating the white imagination and maintaining white supremacy. For these reasons, I would like to take a closer look at the images that accompany the unidentified and untitled figures featured within Lewis’ work.

There are several points in the work in which the subject is blatantly marked as ambiguous, as if the descriptor is referring to a body that is racially ambiguous, a body that cannot be placed into a category that signifies neither shade of blackness nor approximations of whiteness. For instance, in the lines “Head and Shoulders Girl / Portrait of an Unidentified Girl /

Young Black Girl,” none of the girls are identified, but the girl in the portrait is described as the

“Unidentified Girl” (Lewis 87). The first girl in this series of descriptions is the “Head and

Shoulders Girl,” and the third girl mentioned is described as young and black, so why is the second girl described as being unidentifiable. The unidentifiable girl could have been the standing girl, the looking girl, the eyes closed eyes open girl, or even in the most simplest of forms, the portrait girl. Instead, she is the “unidentified girl,” and there are several of these instances through Lewis’ work (87). With these types of descriptions, it seems as though the

beholder—the presumably white artist, curator, and/or museum director—is not able to racially

categorize these particular subjects.

Lewis, however, as declared in her prologue, which details the constraints she employed, does identify the subjects which seemed unidentifiable. In the prologue, Lewis explains that she

“chose to include female figures [she] believed the Western art world had not realized were black women passing for white” (36). Whether or not Lewis correctly pinpointed these “black women passing for white” is not really of relevance, but the fact that this poet author even acknowledged the fact that there were, and are, black women who have such ethnocentric features that they could pass for white is of utmost importance, for this seemingly small acknowledgement seemed to be erased within the white imagination of Western art where the mere captions and titles attached to depictions of blackness are abundant enough to curate an entire collection of poetry. In this way, blackness, whether racially ambiguous or not, constructed in the white imagination of Western art, is indefinitely and perpetually located in the

depths of historical erasure. In other words, within the confinement of white imagination, black

bodies are merely bodies and racially ambiguous bodies are not even black bodies but are

unidentifiable bodies, both of which show up as nameless.

To that end, many of the unidentified or untitled descriptions, such as the “Untitled

Family” and the “Unidentified Something / That Ain’t Born Yet,” could, in fact, be, and

probably are, allusions of racial ambiguity (Lewis 92, 98). Lewis’ pinpointing of these racially

ambiguous women is especially made apparent in the case of the “unidentified girl” (87). In one

line, we get the title “Portrait of an Unidentified Girl,” and the line that immediately follows is

“Young Black Girl,” so these two lines ultimately read as “Portrait of an Unidentified Girl /

Young Black Girl” (87). The placement of these titles, or captions, seems to be a way of

amending the erasure, or unacknowledged aspect, of the unidentified girl’s identity, for the

“Young Black Girl” in the second line seems to be in reference to what the original artist,

curator, or museum director may have initially overlooked into erasure.

Lewis’ work ultimately seems to recuperate a multitude of erasures that concern black

female subjectivity. The first instance of recuperation is found in Lewis’ list of constraints in

which she explains how she took the liberty of re-erasing the African American description that had replaced historical markers such as “slave, colored, and negro” (35). Ironically, the term

“colored” was not used nearly as often as “slave” and “negro”; nonetheless, Lewis employed this re-erasure as a means of prohibiting the erasure of historical-markers that alluded to different eras of oppression within Black American history. Lewis not only presents diverse representations of blackness with references that allude to a variety of black complexions but also highlights black community in that the images in her work feature a shared experience among those individuals who identify and are identified as black. Lewis furthered her non- complicity in the erasure of black history by incorporating a variety of non-canonized art forms into her work, and, as made evident in the case of the “unidentified girl,” Lewis was able to resuscitate the racially ambiguous black female body from historical erasure enacted by the canonized world of Western art.

In bell hooks’ Black Looks, hooks write that “radical black female subjectivity is rooted in a willingness to go against the grain,” and Lewis’ constraints for her work have definitely paved the way for her to go against the grain (52). Lewis’ constraints, her unapologetic refusal to adopt a sanitized version of historical-markers that allude to blackness, and her willingness to acknowledge diverse representations of black looks, such as the racially ambiguous black women figures she resurrected from Western art erasure have ultimately given way for this poet

author to produce images that encourage readers to think differently about subjectivity. Radical

black subjectivity then, for Lewis’s work, is the idea of an embodied subjectivity in which the

body—the lived experience of the body—contributes to the acquisition of individual knowledges. Lewis’ focus on the body ultimately aligns with the idea of an embodied subjectivity in that her work presents the body and its markers of difference as an alternative route to understanding the ways in which those individual subjectivities are constructed.

Lewis’ diverse representations of the black body no longer function as the white

imagination’s construction of blackness in Western art. Just as “women can no longer take on the

function of being the body for men while men are left free to soar to the heights of theoretical

reflection and cultural production” blackness should no longer be the bodily construction of

cultural production that allows the white imagination to soar to artistic heights (Grosz 22). In

other words, when people of color are positioned as the working body, or the constructed body,

in the white imagination of literary and artistic endeavors, these individuals are often faced with

the high-risk of erasure. Lewis’ work is not only a reminder of this erasure but is also a

recuperation of that which has been erased. The poet author’s work essentially lays the

groundwork for readers to examine subjectivity as that which is not only psychical but

embodied.

Tretheway, in her collection titled Bellocq’s Ophelia, employs a similar yet different

ekphrastic technique. Within this collection, Tretheway does not examine works of art, nor does

she transcribe, but Tretheway does perform resuscitation by way of ekphrasis. The poet-author enacts the ekphrastic technique with Ernest J. Bellocq’s photograph of a prostitute who was known to work at an “Octoroon brothel.” In doing so, Tretheway expands upon the prostitution

narrative presented in the photograph and re-presents the intersectionality that this particular

69 woman would have had to navigate through during the period in which this photograph was produced. Tretheway’s collection ultimately releases the female figure from the depths of objectification and humanizes her. The writer’s ekphrastic collection is comprised of poems inspired by an untitled photograph taken by E.J. Bellocq in 1912.

Fig. 1: Ernest J. Bellocq photograph, “Untitled” (1942)

Among a collection of untitled Bellocq photographs, spectators will find the nameless

“Octoroon woman of 1912” who is dressed in Bellocq’s white patriarchal gaze. However,

Tretheway’s work shifts the gaze, and in doing so, she pieces together a new story, a new narrative. It is a narrative that is not necessarily crafted by the woman in the photograph, who

Tretheway has named Ophelia, but is definitely a product of “black female spectatorship,” to borrow a term from hooks. In this way, Tretheway’s ekphrastic approach provides a narrative of black female subjectivity that could not have otherwise been rendered by Bellocq’s patriarchal gaze. Ophelia’s story is no longer just a one-dimensional story of a prostitute but instead is an account of the way a woman of her time might negotiate intersectionalities of race, class, and

70 gender. Through this ekphrastic process of black female spectatorship, Tretheway allows readers to see beyond the male gaze and into the life of the woman portrayed in Bellocq’s photograph.

For Tretheway, Bellocq’s subject was similar to the female subjects found in the works of

John Everett Millais and William Shakespeare. These women had something in common. Each of the female subjects had a voice that was silenced by the male gaze. Millais 1852 painting titled Ophelia is of a woman who appears to be dead, for she is floating face up in a pool of creek or swamp-like water. Her open palms face the sky. Her eyes are open, but she is not looking directly at us, the audience. She is staring up into the sky.

Fig. 2: John Everett Millais’ portrait, “Ophelia” (1852)

As spectators, we are looking at this floating woman, who appears to be dead, and she does not look back at us. Millais gazes upon his female subject, but does not give her permission to look back at her audience: neither at him nor at us. She is constructed, without agency, as something to be looked upon by Millais and his audience alike. Just like Millais’ Ophelia,

Shakespeare’s Ophelia is not only the female whose life is dictated and constructed by men or the male gazes within her life, but she is the young girl whose life ends with her singing of flowers and drowning in a pool of river water. For Tretheway, Bellocq’s photographs are a

71 reminder of Millais’ Ophelia and Shakespeare’s Ophelia all tangled up in and silenced by the male gaze.

Inspired by two distinctly different yet similar works of art, Tretheway’s double, or perhaps triple, ekphrastic work immediately draws comparisons between Bellocq’s photograph and a painting by John Everett Millais. In drawing these comparisons, Tretheway, finding the name Ophelia to be appropriate, names the “untitled,” or nameless woman, as made apparent within the first two stanzas of the poem that titles the book.

In Millais’s paining, Ophelia dies faceup,

eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp

of her last word or breath, flowers and reeds

growing out of the pond, floating on the surface

around her. The young woman who posed

lay in a bath for hours, shivering,

catching cold, perhaps imagining fish

tangling in her hair or nibbling a dark mole

raised upon her white skin. Ophelia’s final gaze

aims skyward, her palms curling open

as if she’s just said, take me.

I think of her when I see Bellocq’s photograph—

a woman posed on a wicker divan, her hair

spilling over. Around her, flowers—

on a pillow, on a thick carpet. Even

the ravages of this old photograph

bloom like water lilies across her thigh.

How long did she hold there, this other

Ophelia, nameless inmate in Storyville,

naked, her nipples offered up hard with cold? (3)

The two Ophelia’s both represent that which not being said, that which is silenced, which, in turn, as Tretheway would say, encourages readers to think about that which is not in the photograph. For example, at one point in “August 1911,” Ophelia asserts “we are known as octoroons— / even the darkest among us— / and customers fill our parlors / to see the spectacle: black women / with white skin,” and readers are quickly made aware of the fact that Ophelia does not embody the phenotypical aspects of signified blackness that were considered normative.

In this sense, the mark of racial difference for Ophelia becomes that which is absent. When

Tretheway’s collection is contextualized with Bellocq’s photograph of Ophelia, it becomes apparent that Tretheway’s work is representative of that which is absent in this particular photograph. In thinking about what is not in the photograph, audiences are pushed to think about, or imagine, what life would be like for this particularly sexualized and objectified woman, beyond the borders of the photograph.

Within the excerpt quoted above, the two Ophelias are not portrayed as owners of their gaze, but as receivers of the gaze—specifically subjugated, silenced, and othered by the male gaze. Tretheway’s Ophelia is constructed by Bellocq as an object, a thing to be looked at, just as

Millais’ Ophelia is constructed as something to be looked upon. Tretheway’s Ophelia is also described as a “nameless inmate in Storyville,” as if she is a prisoner to the story, or narrative, created by Bellocq’s male gaze.

Ironically, Tretheway names the woman in Bellocq’s painting in the same breath she uses

to describe the woman as nameless. Through her research, Tretheway pieces together what could

have been Ophelia’s narrative, a narrative that is not necessarily crafted by the woman in the

photograph but is definitely a product of black female spectatorship, what hooks defines as an

oppositional gaze. In an interview conducted by David Haney, Tretheway reveals the multitude

of layers within her collection:

I kept focusing on the difference between art and life. . . . I’m looking at the two

photographs, the two images, the painting and the photograph, for the ways in

which they are alike, and that’s the first thing I am struck by. But I also, because

of research, know a little bit more, so that’s always where I enter. I can’t simply

look at any piece of art without thinking about its historical and social contexts,

how it was made. . . . And there are ways in which they try to make you see only

one part of that. . . . with Bellocq’s photographs, it just seemed natural then to

imagine the circumstances of the woman who posed for him, because we don’t

know the names of those women. And not that Bellocq was trying to render them

nameless or anything, but history has in some ways. . . . the third layering of

imagery or story is that of Ophelia in Hamlet who at some point didn’t have a

furtherance of her own voice. . . . so then there’s the fourth layering, the next

woman Ophelia, who is my character Ophelia, who actually can then speak where

there has been no voice before. (26-27)

As explained by Tretheway, Bellocq’s Ophelia shares similarities with the Ophelias presented in both Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Millais painting. The interest, for Tretheway, begins as a comparing and contrasting of the two aforementioned images but eventually moves into an

examination of the circumstances in which this particular woman labored through in order for

Bellocq to take the photograph. Tretheway also began to notice the similarities between the

woman in Bellocq’s photograph and Hamlet’s Ophelia. All of the women, without voice, are constructed by the male gaze, however sympathetic, and offered up to the subjected gaze of audiences. The subjugation and lack of voice found in these different representations of women

then led to the construction of Tretheway’s Ophelia, a woman with both voice and subjectivity.

Through the ekphrastic process of naming the woman in Bellocq’s photograph and providing a

platform for her voice, Tretheway’s work upends this subjugation and provides the space for this

particular woman to explore not only her own voice but subjectivity.

As Tretheway’s collection unfolds, readers see Ophelia toy with the concept of what it is

to name and be named, and the simple act of naming becomes the first step towards shifting this

black female figure into examining the white patriarchal gaze. This concept of naming is

especially important within black culture at this particular point in time in the very early 20th

century. During slavery, slave traders named those who were enslaved, which meant that

enslaved people were not allowed to carry on their family name. Ophelia’s mother and/or

grandparents would have had direct experiences with slavery and would have likely stressed the

importance of a name. The process of naming is also the process of defining, and those who were

enslaved were both named and defined, just as Ophelia is named and defined, by the white male

gaze within a patriarchal system of white supremacy. In the section of the collection that is titled

“Storyville Diary,” readers are privy to Ophelia’s innermost thoughts as she conjures up one of

the first images she has of her father in the poem titled “Naming”:

I cannot remember the first word

I learned to write—perhaps it was my name

......

My own name was a chant

over the washboard, a song to guide me

into sleep. Once my mother pushed me toward

a white man in our front room. Your father,

she whispered. He’s the one that named you, girl. (37)

With this passage, Ophelia recalls her name as being the first word she learned to write, and she also remembers her mother explaining how Ophelia’s father, a white male, was the one to name her. Theoretically, the father’s naming of Ophelia is also symbolic of the ways in which the gaze produces and projects definitions of self onto Ophelia. For instance, when Ophelia is out in public, she is perceived as white by any given passersby, as made evident in the lines “I walk these streets / a white woman” (7). However, when she is at the octoroon brothel, she is one of the “black women / with white skin” (26). In many instances, the system of white patriarchal supremacy in which Ophelia functions has tried to define her by naming her. Ophelia’s white male father seems to symbolically mimic the ways in which a white patriarchal system exercises its power in its many attempts to define her.

The images Ophelia provides of her father are also quite similar to the way in which she views Bellocq, the photographer. The following lines from two separate poems in the volume reveal several parallels between the two, her father and Bellocq:

Father

—February 1911

There is but little I recall of him—how

I feared his visits, though he would bring me gifts . . .

In exchange I must present fingernails

and ears, open my mouth to show teeth.

......

How

I wanted him to like me, think me smart,

a delicate colored girl

......

I search now for his face among the men (38)

Bellocq

—April 1911

There comes a quiet man now to my room—

Papa Bellocq, his camera on his back.

......

I try to pose as I think he would like—shy

at first, then bolder. I’m not so foolish

that I don’t know this photograph we make

will bear the stamp of his name, not mine (39)

With this passage, Ophelia draws an uncanny connection between Bellocq and her own father. In both relationships, she looks for approval from a white male, an irony not lost on readers. In a world that caters to white patriarchal supremacy, one of Ophelia’s primary concerns is to obtain approval from the white men in her life. Between the two poems, Ophelia eagerly and willingly offers her body up to be looked upon, or defined by way of the gaze. In the “Father” poem, she

77 confides “how I wanted him to like me, think me smart,” and in the “Bellocq” poem, Bellocq shows up as the father figure “Papa Bellocq,” and Ophelia explains “I try to pose as I think he would like.” In both instances, Ophelia’s body will be defined by the gaze, as either good or bad—her teeth, ears, and fingernails will either be clean enough or too dirty for the exchange of gifts, and her bodily pose will be deemed as either good enough or not enough for the photo being taken by Bellocq. On one hand, it is ultimately the gaze that will name, or define, her in these moments with each of these fatherly figures. On the other hand, the pairing of these two poems reveals a radical shift in Ophelia’s sense of self. While both poems feature the ways in which Ophelia seeks approval, the “Bellocq” poem is a radical shift from the “Father” poem, which is blatantly clear when Ophelia asserts “I’m not so foolish / that I don’t know this photograph we make / will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.” The weight of this statement is not only a radical shift from the pleasing-Ophelia in the “Father” poem but it also speaks to the

“Father” poem. Bellocq’s photograph will bear the stamp of Papa Bellocq’s name just as Ophelia bears the name of her father—not that there is anything wrong with bearing the name of one’s father. However, when the act of naming is viewed as a form of definition, Ophelia becomes seemingly bound by a series of white patriarchal definitions that are, again and again, projected onto her.

Ophelia is ultimately presented as spectacle, as the passive recipient of the gaze.

Although the idea of spectacle is traditionally discussed in film theory, the photograph of

Ophelia has positioned her as spectacle. Ophelia is not only the focus of Bellocq’s blatant male gaze in this particular moment, but the photograph produced by Bellocq heightens her lookedatness and intensifies her objectification by positioning her at the center of any onlooker’s attention. With her father, for example, she “must present fingernails / and ears” and open her

“mouth to show teeth” for her father to inspect, and her complicity appears passive. Ophelia

strikes a similar inspection, for Bellocq, in which she tries “to pose” her body in a way “he

would like,” but then Ophelia also has a profound moment of reflective insight, which alludes to

her developing sense of agency.

In the former instance, Ophelia seems to be locked in as spectacle, as a passive recipient

of the gaze in which she presents her body up for inspection; however, in the latter instance,

Ophelia radically shifts from passive to autonomous. This shift occurs when Ophelia’s shy pose

turns to a “bold” pose that is mirrored by Ophelia’s bold statement: “I’m not so foolish / that I

don’t know this photograph we make / will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.” As she poses

“shy / at first, then bolder,” her bold pose is then followed with a bold assertion that breaks away

from the shackles of objectification and into the sanctuary of self-awareness in which she is quite aware of the fact that this photograph of her will bear her body but not her name, not her definition of self. Instead, it will bear Bellocq’s name, Bellocq’s definition of her. Because

“Ophelia is in the process of acquiring not only a sense of self in terms of seeing, but also a sense of self by having a voice,” the radical shift we, as readers, see in this statement is critical to understanding Ophelia’s journey of self-definition and subjectivity (Tretheway qtd. in Haney,

27). On one hand, her bold assertion seems to condone the fact that Bellocq’s photo will not bear her name; on the other hand, her assertion can be read as the emergence of Self. In this instance,

Ophelia is quite aware of the ways in which others not only see her but attempt to define her, and self-awareness is one of the first steps in “the process of acquiring not only a sense of self in terms of seeing, but also a sense of self by having a voice.” Although Ophelia does not reject

Bellocq’s definition of her in this moment, her bold assertion profoundly contributes to her process of becoming the autonomous being we see at the end of Tretheway’s collection. These

indirect moments of emerging agency are critical because, as we see, Ophelia is subjected to

many forms of objectification.

In fact, Ophelia is outright described as a prisoner of objectification:

the ravages of this old photograph

bloom like water lilies across her thigh.

How long did she hold there, this other

Ophelia, a nameless inmate in Storyville,

Naked, her nipples offered up hard with cold? (3)

Indicated by Tretheway’s line break, Ophelia is literally described as “other,” which implies that

there is some sort of norm in which Ophelia is being measured by, or othered against. She is not

perceived as the norm: she is described as “other” than the norm. And this othering seems to

distinguish Bellocq’s Ophelia from both Millais’ Ophelia and Shakespeare’s Ophelia. The

female subject within both Millais and Shakespeare’s work is othered by a binary of gender. The

male was a dominating force; therefore, the female was othered by male dominance. Bellocq’s

Ophelia is locked into two forms of otherness: gender and race.

Throughout the collection, there are also many descriptions that allude to the concealment of identity. In a “Letter Home,” Ophelia writes:

though I pretend not to notice—the dark maids

ambling by with their white charges. Do I deceive

anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown

as your dear face, they’d know I’m not quite

what I pretend to be. I walk these streets

a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes

of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine,

a negress again. (7)

The concealment of identity here also stirs up and brings forth Ophelia’s notions of self.

Although onlookers think of Ophelia as white, Ophelia does not perceive herself in that way; in fact, throughout the collection, Ophelia describes her skin as white and pale, but in this passage, she questions “do I deceive / anyone?” and explains how she walks the public streets as a white woman until she catches “the eyes of some stranger” upon her. Ophelia also asserts “I try to recall what I was thinking— / how not to be exposed, though naked, how / to wear skin like a garment,” and in another instance, Ophelia, as she’s learning how photography works, declares

“in the negative / the whole world reverses, my black dress turned / white, my skin blackened to pitch. Inside out, / I said, thinking of what I’ve tried to hide (42, 43). As made apparent by the aforementioned lines, and especially blatant in the last passage, Ophelia’s blackness is not only absent from Bellocq’s photograph but, in accordance with the norms by which we categorize race, is also absent from her body.

Although we might understand these types of assertions as a reference to Ophelia concealing her black heritage as a means of passing for white, I also read these declarations as a possible testament to the way Ophelia perceives her own identity, which is explored in the following lines:

When Bellocq doesn’t like a photograph

he scratches across the plate. But I know

other ways to obscure a face—paint it

with rouge and powder, shades lighter than skin,

don a black velvet mask. (44)

In the previous lines, obscurity is synonymous with scratch. For example, Ophelia explains that

“when Bellocq doesn’t like a photograph / he scratches across the plate” as a means of obscuring the image in the photograph, and then she also explains “I know / other ways to obscure a face.”

In other words, her version of obscuring a face is likened to the irreversible damage of the scratch across Bellocq’s plated photograph. Although Ophelia’s techniques of obscurity—

“rouge and powder . . . a black velvet mask”—are temporary forms of concealment, she likens these temporary forms to the way a scratch can irreversibly damage a plated photograph. The likening of these two terms, a scratch and obscurity, seem to give way to several interpretations.

In one interpretation, Ophelia asserts the concealment of one’s racial identity, whether temporary or otherwise, causes irreversible damage to individual subjectivity, for the subjectivity of the individual is an embodied subjectivity that pursuits the acquisition of knowledge by way of both psychical and lived-body experience. The second interpretation is one in which Ophelia’s lived- body experience has been one in which she is located on the margins of racial borders and is perpetually oscillating between two distinctly different categories of race—either painting her face “shades lighter than skin” or donning “a black velvet mask.” The third interpretation is one in which race, for Ophelia, is a mask. The “rouge and powder, shade lighter than skin” and the

“black velvet mask” are all forms of concealment, or forms of obscurity. In this interpretation,

Ophelia alludes to the experience of passing for both black and white, which seems to transcend the seemingly fixed and rigid borders between racial categories.

Another interpretation, however, can be found in the way Ophelia likens the lived-body’s face to that of a photograph, which may be how she has come to reconcile the ways in which her blackness is perceived as something that can be found under her white skin. Through her photography sessions with Bellocq, she has learned that her blackness is absent from her

photographs, as is made apparent when she views the negative images of her photographs and

deems the negative prints as her inside-out version of self. In this sense, Ophelia seems to align herself with the notion that her blackness is hidden under her white skin. With this last interpretation, Ophelia comes to the realization that blackness is not necessarily “visible” on her body. Although she identifies as black, her racial identification is absent from the body, and this absence, so to speak, ultimately becomes a marker of difference for Ophelia and women like

Ophelia. For this reason, Tretheway’s ekphrastic collection is critical. The absence of blackness as a marker for blackness seems to be the less explored concept in generalized explorations of both Black American and Western history. Tretheway’s collection not only works on behalf of freeing this woman from the shackles of objectification but also works to resuscitate narratives that specifically revolve around the absence of blackness as a marker of difference.

In many ways, the absence of Ophelia’s blackness becomes a point of hyper-focus, which is evident in the following passage:

August 1911

It is true, as you imagined we do

much business here, mainly because

we are known as octoroons—

even the darkest among us—

and customers fill our parlors

to see the spectacle: black women

with white skin, exotic curiosities. (26)

With this passage, Ophelia is not only aware of the way in which Bellocq’s photograph positions her as spectacle but is also fully aware of the ways in which her occupation relies on her position

83 as spectacle. Ophelia asserts that “customers fill our parlors / to see the spectacle: black women / with white skin.” This assertion alludes to fetishism. Ophelia’s understanding of the system of white supremacy in which she functions is made quite evident in that she realizes the way that this racial system of white supremacy has placed her into a position of spectacle and fetish.

Ophelia does not fit the image that has been attached to each racial category thus she is socially perceived as an anomaly, as something that is not of the norm. For white men, Ophelia and the other fair-skinned black women are considered “exotic curiosities.” These women are not only considered exotic, as in foreign, but are also viewed as a curiosity, as in strange and unusual. If these definitions are contextualized with the racial references in the poem, Ophelia’s racial identity is noted as strange and unusual and is defined as something that is foreign to both blackness and whiteness. When we examine race as a conceptual construct, we see that race is “a representation or signification of identity that refers to different types of human bodies, to the perceived corporeal and phenotypic markers of difference” (Omi and Winant, 111). In this sense,

Ophelia was perceived as foreign because her body, as a signification of identity, did not signify the perceived corporeal and phenotypic markers of difference that were considered normative for blackness and whiteness. For this reason, Ophelia is defined as both spectacle and fetish by the white and patriarchal supremacist society in which she functions, and Tretheway’s work reveals the ways in which societal norms become complicit in these perceptions.

According to Stuart Hall’s Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying

Practices, fetishism occurs when there is a “substitution of a part for the whole—an object, an organ, a portion of the body—for the subject . . . what is shown or seen, in representation, can only be understood in relation to what cannot be seen what cannot be shown” (266). For Ophelia, it is her blackness that is “invisible” to the eye or “not shown,” and it is her name that becomes

engorged with the hint of the way she is subjected to fetishism, as is made apparent in the

following lines from “December 1910”:

at her house. She calls me Violet now—

a common name here in Storyville—except

that I am the African Violet for the promise

of that wild continent hidden beneath

my white skin. (13)

Here, Ophelia opens this passage with the concept of what it is to be named. She goes on to

explain how “African Violet” alludes to “that wild continent hidden beneath” her white skin.

The language used to describe, or sell, Ophelia is worthy of an investigation that Toni Morrison

refers to as American Africanism, which is “an investigation into the ways in which a nonwhite,

Africanistic presence was constructed in the United States” and eventually used in the

imaginative (1792). In defining this Africanistic presence, Morrison writes, “I am using the term

‘Africanism’ as a term for the denotative and connotative blackness African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreading that characterize these peoples in Eurocentric eyes” (1792). Although Morrison’s investigation focuses on the ways in which Africanism was used in the imaginative, Tretheway, in this passage, seems to be drawing from the ways in which this Africanistic presence was socially constructed and maintained in the social fabric of the United States.

The “African Violet” name given to Ophelia was meant to allude to “that wild continent hidden beneath / my white skin,” and this allusion was meant to be a selling point, which is blatantly clear when Ophelia writes “customers fill our parlors / to see the spectacle: black women / with white skin” (13, 26). However, this allusion is ultimately reflexive of the society in

which Ophelia functions. It is “a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the

[social consciousness] . . . an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnamity” (Morrison, 1793). When Ophelia’s blackness is described as a hidden “wild continent,” the adjective wild constructs an Africanistic presence that is “deployed as rawness and savagery” and in need of taming (1796). The descriptions used to describe Ophelia, in accordance with her occupation, construct an image of a distressed damsel in need of a white male savior who can penetrate her whiteness and conquer, tame, civilize “that wild continent hidden beneath.” In other words, Ophelia is constructed, or defined, by all of the Eurocentric views, assumptions, readings, misreading and connotations that, for Eurocentric eyes, have been made to signify blackness in the United States.

In this sense, it is Ophelia’s skin that seems to be the substituted part for the whole

because, as previously mentioned, the perception of Ophelia’s white skin, in regards to racial

identity, is constructed in a way “where what is shown or seen, in representation, can only be

understood in relation to what cannot be seen, what cannot be shown” (Hall 266). In other words,

Ophelia’s blackness, which has been Eurocentrically constructed as an Africanistic presence, is

what cannot be shown and is therefore considered as the invisible, or the unknown, or an

invisible marker of difference. The visibility of Ophelia’s fair, pale skin, as it relates to her

invisible black or “African” essence, is then placed into a position of fetishism. To this end,

absence—the absence of what black is supposed to look like—essentially marks her body with

difference.

In the next passage, Ophelia’s pathology is linked to the “visible” and “invisible” aspects

of her race.

At her cue, I walked slowly

across the room, paused in strange postures

until she called out, Tableau vivant, and

I could move again—all this to show

the musical undulation of my hips, my grace,

and my patience which was to mean

that it is my nature to please and that I could,

if so desired, pose still as a statute for hours (13-14)

Ophelia’s grace and patience becomes the featured qualities that audiences can visibly see in the

way she “walked slowly across the room” and “paused in strange postures,” but she is also

described as having a “wild continent hidden beneath” her skin. It is here that readers begin to

see the oppositional binaries imposed on Ophelia. She is black and white, graceful/patient and

wild, or, in other words, primitive and civilized. Among both black and/or white women, women

like Ophelia are “the embodiment of difference” because women like Ophelia do not

symbolically fit the norms applied to either black or white women. These societal norms become

the basis for which women like Ophelia are pathologized by their difference, and this difference

is then “represented as a pathological form of ‘otherness’” (Hall 265). Tretheway breaks away

from the boundaries of this pathological otherness by bringing it to the forefront of her work.

Tretheway’s work provides a space for Ophelia to explore her own subjectivity, and this

exploration ultimately makes visible out of that which was deemed invisible.

In lines from “August 1911,” this visible-invisibility is especially evident in the placement of Tretheway’s line break. In one line, Ophelia says that customers are there “to see the spectacle: black women,” and in the next line Ophelia explains that the spectacle is not only black women but “black women / with white skin” (26). However, the placement of the line

87 break alludes to the ways in which not only “black women / with white skin” but black women, in general, were perceived as spectacle. A more specific example of this allusion can be found in the way “Saartje (or Sarah) Baartman, known as ‘the Hottentot Venus’ . . . was brought to

England in 1819 by a Boer farmer from the Cape region of South Africa and a doctor on an

African ship, and regularly exhibited over five years in London and Paris” (Hall 264). The series of exhibits featuring Baartman are described as follows:

In her early ‘performances’, she was produced on a raised stage like a wild beast,

came and went from her cage when ordered . . . . both in London and Paris, she

became famous in two quite different circles: amongst the general public as a

popular ‘spectacle’, commemorated in ballads, cartoons, illustrations, in

melodramas and newspaper reports; and amongst naturalists and ethnologists,

who measured, observed, drew, wrote learned treatises about, modeled, made

waxen moulds and plaster casts, and scrutinized every detail, of her anatomy,

dead and alive. (264-65)

Hall explains that the first obsession with Baartman was the marking of “difference.” Baartman symbolically, physically, did not align with any of the ethnocentric norms that European women adhered to; therefore, as Hall states, she was “constructed as other.” The second obsession perceived her body as text, and that “text” became the evidence and/or proof of her otherness, which was the premise for “an irreversible difference between the races” (Hall 265). Ophelia is, in many ways, read in the same fashion of otherness and irreversible racial difference that was projected onto Baartman.

There are, however, key differences between the ways in which both Ophelia and

Baartman are othered. The first being tied to the fact that Baartman’s difference was visible and

Ophelia’s was not. The second difference revolves around the physical space in which these women function. Ophelia is predominantly read as white, and as she writes letters to her hometown friend, it becomes apparent that the only times she is not read as white is when she is at the brothel. In this sense, Ophelia’s racial identity is consistently subjugated to the gaze and seems to undergo a series of readings that throw her racial identity into oscillation. For example,

Ophelia never actually lays claim to a racial identity; instead, she circles around everyone else’s perceptions of her identity to which we get lines like “I wanted him to like me, think me smart / a delicate colored girl” in which she does not actually state that she is a “colored girl” but asserts that she wants her father to think of her as “smart / a delicate colored girl” (38) Throughout the collection, we, as readers, are faced with the slipperiness of such lines to which Ophelia never actually roots herself in a racial identity but instead oscillates in the perception of how others view her.

While Baartman was portrayed and constructed as a counter to ethnocentric norms,

Ophelia occupation defined and constructed her as Other because she did and did not fit the

Western norms applied to white women. In this sense, both women are placed into a hyper- sexualized position of spectacle. Through a series of descriptions that oscillate on sets of oppositional binaries, Ophelia’s identity is defined by the brothel as something that is split, or splintered. The enjambment of the lines in the “August 1911” passage provides readers with an image of such splintering: customers are there to see “the spectacle: black women / with white skin.” In these two lines, Ophelia’s identity is literally fragmented. The identity here is not described as black and white; instead, the women, including Ophelia, are described as black women with white skin. In this way, Ophelia is presented as the embodiment of (black/white, invisible/visible, wild/grace) oppositional binaries—she is constructed as being a marker of

89 difference with a symbolically normative aspect that is applied to white standards of beauty for women in the United States—thus she is constructed as spectacle.

Tretheway provides the space for Ophelia to explore and develop her own subjectivity because, as we have seen, “Ophelia doesn’t have any sense of herself that’s not rooted in the gaze of someone else” (Haney 22). Ophelia’s identity essentially oscillates on and is dictated by other’s perceptions of her; however, there are small moments that hint at Ophelia’s radical shift from a passive subject to an autonomous subject. For example, in the poem “Disclosure,”

Ophelia writes, or discloses, “I’ve learned to keep / my face behind the camera, my lens aimed / at a dream of my own making. / What power” (44). The line that explains how she has learned to keep her face behind the camera not only suggests Ophelia’s longing to be free of the gaze that perpetually attempts to define her but also hints at Ophelia’s longing to control the gaze, for this control would then free her from the definitions projected onto her by the gaze. Furthermore, it is within these lines that she revels at the power in pursuing a dream of her own making. Not long after this revelation, Ophelia fully comes into her own autonomy. Tretheway explains that “in the second to the last poem, ‘Self Portrait,’ she [Ophelia] mentions that mistake of leaving the lens cover on. And so, she sees the reflection of her own eye, which is, of course, metaphor for the eye being turned inward to the self,” and this reflection of her own eye is the first time Ophelia views herself as “I,” as a fully autonomous being (Haney 23). Tretheway further explains, “I wanted to find a way for her to exit all of the frameworks that I had created for her, so I have her stepping out of the frame of the photograph, and she steps out of the frame of the book itself and goes out into her own life, no longer shaped by someone else’s gaze” (qtd. in Hall xvi). This newfound autonomy is then fully embraced in the last line of the last poem “Vignette.”

he waits

for the right moment, a look on her face

to keep in a gilded frame, the ornate box

he’ll put her in

......

imagine her a moment later—after

the flash, blinded—stepping out

of the frame, wide-eyed, into her life. (47-48)

The moment “after the flash” Ophelia steps out of Bellocq’s frame, steps out of the frame of the book, essentially freeing her from the spectacle frame of spectatorship. Tretheway’s work not only frees Ophelia from the frame of spectatorship in Bellocq’s photograph but also frees

Ophelia from the collection’s frame of spectatorship. By providing this narrative, the poet’s exploratory collection takes readers beyond the male gaze and into black female spectatorship.

While Bellocq provides the image of a woman who is looked upon, Tretheway essentially becomes a conduit for the voice and heart of this woman’s multi-dimensional and complex human experience.

Although it is impossible to document the narrative and explore the subjectivity of every individual, Tretheway moves her work from the individual and into the social in that her work is representative of a particular type of subjectivity that is often overlooked, especially within the

United States, a system that strictly adheres to the rigid boundaries of racial categorizations.

Tretheway asserts that “the character Ophelia represents that kind of person who would have been ignored in official public histories, who may not have left records for us to know her individual narrative” (Turner, 156). In fact, it is noted that for many years, as it pertains to formations of race, “the extensive ‘hybridization’ of racial cultures in the U.S. societies went

largely untheorized” (Omi and Winant, 93). For this reason, the theoretical resuscitation of

racially-plural individuals such as Ophelia, the woman in Bellocq’s photograph, is not only

critical to our understanding of Black history and racial formation in America but also allows us

to free ourselves from archaic preconceptions in regards to both the black and racially ambiguous

body.

For these reasons, the ekphrastic process is critical to our overall understanding of Black

American history in general, as made evident in Lewis’ work. Lewis’ work embodies a range of

diverse black looks; however, the racially-plural figure rarely appears in her work, which speaks volumes as to the ways in which the cannon of Western art views Black American history. In other words, the cannon of Western art, which contains works predominantly from white artists and curators, neither sees nor understands the important significance in providing diverse representations of black looks. And at times, the white imagination does not necessarily view racially ambiguous black figures as black, which becomes evident in Lewis’ prologue, as it details how the poet author took the liberty of including racially ambiguous black woman whom she believed were passing for white. In this sense, Lewis’ excavation works to recuperate diverse representations of black looks but also works as a foundation to understand embodied subjectivity which provides us with an alternative way of looking at the histories she recuperates by way of ekphrasis.

The ekphrastic works from both Lewis and Tretheway ultimately resurrects the black female figure from erasure and gives way to the inevitable intersectionalities that concern identity. In doing so, ekphrastic poetry becomes a conduit for exploring the ways in which subjectivity is not only psychical but embodied and corporeal, which ultimately contributes to and advances forward the many conversations concerning black subjectivities. In this sense,

92 ekphrasis is especially important to Black American history, for in many ways the approach works as a tool of excavation, unearthing pieces of not only history but narratives of subjectivity that have been buried in the past. It is this ekphrastic approach that will no longer allow us to be apathetic or complicit in the normative ways in which black bodies are historically erased.

Conclusion: From Girls to Woman: (Re)Writing, Recuperating, Resuscitating Biracialism in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and Natasha Tretheway

In chapter 1, I explore Larsen’s work to assert that the mere existence of the biracial, multiracial, or racially ambiguous figure works as a disrupting force that subverts the fixity of racial categorizations that erupted in the early twentieth-century. Because the biracial figure lives in a perpetual space that is blackandwhite, the figure collapses the borders between black and white. The biracial figure and its passing narrative both disrupt and subvert the seemingly rigid portrayal of racial categories. While the biracial figure’s racial identity blurs the boundaries of racial categories, the act of passing renders these categories as being rooted in the unreliable gaze. Passing then becomes a reflected subversion of the subversion that occurs with the mere existence of the biracial figure. According to categories of race in the early twentieth-century, the biracial figure technically resides, always, within the socially constructed position of both black and white. However, in accordance with the early twentieth-century’s statutes concerning racial categories, the biracial figure was never treated with the privileges that were given to whites, so when this blackandwhite biracial figure passes for white, the figure undermines, or in other words subverts, the very laws and social customs that dictate the definition of what it is to be black or white. The black biracial figure that passes for white receives white privilege while remaining biracially black; therefore, the passing narrative renders race as arbitrary and subverts white supremacist laws and customs. With that said, Larsen’s biracial figures become the types of characters that not only epitomize the antithesis of segregation but also present race as one of many significant forms of identification that is ultimately constructed by an arbitrary gaze. I further assert that the tragic mulatto is presented as a projection produced and constructed by the arbitrary gaze rather than the tragic trope of a figure that embodies personal, or cultural,

94 pathologies. With these assertions, I argue that through a series of subversions, Larsen’s work deconstructs the tragic mulatto trope, and in the crossfire of deconstruction, provides a space for an interracial union to exist in a world that largely upheld social and legal laws of anti- miscegenation.

My chapter 2 assertions insist that the pathologies of the tragic mulatto can be found in

Pecola Breedlove, whose mental degeneration can be read as the death that traditional versions of the tragic mulatto found peace. Because Pecola is stamped with the tragic mulatto symptoms, she also bears the literary weight of racial signification for both the readers and the narrator,

Claudia, for it is Claudia who is able to eventually understand what that thing was that made people in their community treat Maureen Peal with more care. However, it is only through

Pecola that Claudia reconciles that thing which ultimately allows her to tell the entirety of this story with hindsight. As such, Pecola’s psychological break might be read as Pecola being crushed under the weighted burden of tremendous signification just as the Imitation of Life’s

Peola’s disappearance might be a gesture “meant to refuse the signifying burden that both contemporary sociology and later literary criticism would place upon her shoulders” (Hiro 100).

Where Peola disappears in refusal, Pecola topples under the weight of racial signification. To that end, I argue that Morrison subverts our notion of what the tragic mulatto is supposed to look like and reveals the tragic mulatto pathologies as the symptoms that show up when one subscribes to and has been swallowed up by a white supremacist system.

Chapter 3 strays from the tragic mulatto trope but stays focused on passing narratives and how these narratives have been historically erased in archives of Western art. Within this chapter, my assertions align with collections of poetry that have recuperated these narratives from historical erasure by way of ekphrasis. While Lewis’ work is foundational to understanding

95 the need for alternative ways of thinking about subjectivity, such as an embodied subjectivity,

Tretheway provides the space for the cultivation of a subjectivity that is embodied. In short, I argue that ekphrasis is not only a way to recuperate these particular narratives but is a means to explore black diversity and embodied subjectivity, for it is an embodied subjectivity that will provide us with alternative ways of thinking about, and talking about, subjectivity in relation to intersectional identities.

There were so many different representations of biracialism that I would have wanted to explore, but my explorations focused on the blackandwhite figure because that particular figure seems to be predominant in regards to black biracial representations, and I believe the predominance of this figure speaks to the ways in which we view race. For this reason, I encourage readers to explore the varying narratives of blackandwhite biracialism. I encourage more exploration into the ways in which the blackandwhite figure disrupts, deconstructs, and/or is a remnant of the tragic mulatto trope. I encourage you, reader, to initiate mixed media explorations into representations of blackandwhite biracialism—explore film, cinema, television.

Remnants of the tragic mulatto figure, as well as other controlling images, are deeply ingrained in these genres, and I encourage an exploration into what these remnant representations mean to our current understanding of race. Examine the ways in which these remnant representations disrupt, complicate, and/or placate the rigid façade of racial categories.

I also encourage more analytical explorations of biracial figures in general: an exploration into how these narratives of biracialism contribute to and complicate our understanding of race, in and of itself, as well as its significations. Gloria Anzuldúa’s creative non-fiction Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, for instance, explores the Mexican-

American “mestiza” notions of biracialism, or “mixed race.” Sherman Alexie has written several

novels about experiences of Native American biracialism. Edith Maude Eaton, who wrote under

the pen name Sui Sen Far, explored her own racially-plural experiences in Leaves from the

Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian. Scholars such as Teresa Kay Williams, Cynthia L. Nakashima,

George Kitahara Kich, and G. Reginald Daniels have even explored the impact of racial-plurality in the classroom, which is detailed in The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New

Frontier. My work is greatly influenced by my reading of books like Mixed Race Studies, and

Half and Half. Although there are many explorations of biracialism in circulation, I ask readers to perpetuate these explorations because, as we can see throughout history, our social definitions of race are in consistent flux. The ways in which we write about race will be the way to check the fluid pulse of racial definitions, but these ways will also be key in challenging the seemingly rigid attitudes about race that ultimately only serve to uphold ideologies of white supremacy.

It is also significantly critical to explore the ways in which ekphrastic works resuscitate lost histories and provide alternative ways of thinking about intersectional identities and embodied subjectivity. Amma Asante and Misan Sagay’s film Belle is an ekphrastic text I would have liked to explore. Belle’s story not only had to be found but pieced together. Sagay explains that Belle begin when the writer noticed an 18th -century portrait of a seemingly nameless woman of color when she visited the Scone Palace museum in Scotland and was immediately drawn to the image. One of the most fascinating aspects of the image was that this particular woman was not portrayed as being inferior to the white woman she stood next to, as many pictures did from this period (Rickey). This nameless portrait woman remained vivid in Sagay’s imagination for many years until she was finally driven to begin researching the nameless woman of color in the

Scone Palace portrait. Sagay found that the woman of color was the biracial niece of the 1st Earl

of Mansfield. At a young age, Belle’s mother, Maria Belle died, so her father, Sir John Lindsay,

97 an Admiral, enlisted his uncle, the Earl, as caretaker. After gaining access to the Mansfield archives, Sagay began to resurrect Belle’s story, and in 2004 the writer pitched the “Jane

Austenesque love story that allows us to explore the black British presence” (Sagay). This was a pivotal moment for Sagay. She had not only found the name of the portrait woman but had also found that this particular woman of color was raised with aristocratic stature during the period of transatlantic slavery. In this moment of discovery, Sagay knew she had to write this story. She had to prevent this story from being historically erased, as the nameless portrait did. Sagay describes Belle as a figure who, not by her own doing, lived and died in silence, which makes

Sagay’s ekphrastic writing all the more critical and significant. Sagay states

Belle is an empowering black female character who goes from caring desperately

about her worth in society to discovering and asserting her worth in herself. In

this drawing-room drama about the life of this young girl, I rewrite the story of

that momentous change in society. We were not freed as a favor. We demanded

and took our freedom as a right. Like Belle. (Sagay)

Written by Misan Sagay and produced by Amma Asante, the film is a period piece set in 18th century Britain, the colonial empire and slave trade capital. Through the telling of Belle’s story,

Sagay and Asante excavated the embodied subjectivity of a seemingly nameless portrait woman and were also able to shed light on the atrocities of the historical Zong ship trial, as many historians tend to believe that Belle had some kind of influence on the outcome of the Zong trial.

During this trial, the Earl of Mansfield had to decide if the death of an enslaved person could be claimed as insured property. In 1781, the Zong ship captain, while at sea, chose to massacre over 100 slaves. The shackled people became sick and were thrown overboard. When the ship docked, the captain and the crew attempted to claim insurance on the people who were

thrown overboard, and two different trials ensued. The first trial, occurring in 1783, ruled in the

slave-holder’s favor. Because of this ruling, the insurers brought the case back to the courts,

where Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, oversaw the case and ruled in favor of the insurers (29

Krikler). With this ruling, Mansfield likened the people who were enslaved to chattel and

implied that there were justifiable reasons for such a massacre but that the Zong ship crew had

no such justification; therefore, the ship owners could not seek retribution for their so-called cargo loss. This case ultimately provided a foundation for the abolishment of slavery in Britain.

Many historians, to this day, believe Lord Mansfield’s ruling had something to do with his biracial niece Dido Elizabeth Belle. According to Asante and Sagay, Dido had a part in

Mansfield’s ruling and was the catalyst that encouraged Mansfield’s ruling that eventually contributed to the advancement of racial equality.

We also must take into consideration the implications of the abolishment of slavery in

Britain, for the abolishment of slavery in Britain was not necessarily exclusive to Britain.

Because Britain was the center of the transatlantic slave trade, Britain’s abolishment of slavery was critical to the abolishment of slavery in the United States. As we see in the film Belle, Black

British peoples were affected by slavery in the way that Black Americans were affected. The impact of slavery is not defined by one’s nationality. The transatlantic slave trade has atrociously impacted black people from all nationalities thus the black British people were affected by slavery in the same way that black American people were affected. The film reveals the ways in which shared experiences transcend, or breach, the borders of nationality. In many ways, this ekphrastic film is also a dialogue shared between both U.S. and British histories in which black history transcends nationality. For these reasons, the film Belle is so critical to our understanding of black history.

To reclaim histories like this, we must continue to interrogate the images that look like us, and where one research study leaves off another should be picked up. Belle details the true story of a black and white biracial heiress, Dido Elizabeth Belle, and the ways in which Belle positioned her (black and white, female and heiress) intersectionality during a time of extreme oppression. As an ekphrastic manuscript, the film not only successfully prevents the erasure of

Black womanhood but renders black female subjectivity as having an influence on a society that oscillates on racial hegemony. In this sense, the film Belle is yet another example of the way human experience is recuperated and brought to the forefront, for it is only by way of ekphrastic storytelling that the film exists. In this sense, I encourage readers to examine and explore ekphrastic works like Lewis, Tretheway, Sagay and Asante explored the stories behind a series of nameless women. I also encourage the interrogation of controlling images such as the tragic mulatto and the ways in which these images are being constructed and/or deconstructed, for it is these types of controlling images that are so intricately ingrained in the social imagination that it is hard not to locate remnants of these controlling tropes. It is both the ekphrastic and interrogative approach that will no longer allow us to be apathetic or complicit in the normative ways in which the black female figure is villainized, essentialized, and/or historically erased. The need for future research like this is not only critical to our understanding of the ways in which the categories of race function in relation to a subjectivity that is embodied, but is also critical to the ways we can reclaim histories that may have been ignored, unrecognized, undocumented, and/or erased.

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