BLACKFACE/WHITEFACE: LANGSTON HUGHES’S PIERROT AND MINSTREL POEMS by JOSHUA M. MURRAY (Under the Direction of R. Baxter Miller) ABSTRACT This thesis analyzes seven of Hughes’s poems that utilize the Pierrot character from the commedia dell’arte tradition as a way of combating the damage caused by American blackface minstrelsy. Hughes uses the white mask of Pierrot to reverse the color binary of a white minstrel wearing blackface. Over the course of the seven poems, the Black Pierrot deviates from the conventional Pierrot’s passive depictions and creates a new identity for himself. This progression provides a metaphor for African Americans as they, too, strive to distance themselves from the stereotypes of minstrelsy. It also solidifies Hughes’s identity as a writer across genres. INDEX WORDS: Langston Hughes, Pierrot, American minstrelsy, commedia dell’arte, blackface, whiteface, The Jester, A Black Pierrot, The Black Clown, Heart, Minstrel Man, For Dead Mimes BLACKFACE/WHITEFACE: LANGSTON HUGHES’S PIERROT AND MINSTREL POEMS by JOSHUA M. MURRAY BA, University of Georgia, 2008 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2011 © 2011 Joshua M. Murray All Rights Reserved BLACKFACE/WHITEFACE: LANGSTON HUGHES’S PIERROT AND MINSTREL POEMS by JOSHUA M. MURRAY Major Professor: R. Baxter Miller Committee: Susan Rosenbaum Valerie Babb Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2011 iv DEDICATION To Kendra, who very lovingly puts up with my affinity for procrastinating and stressing out. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 THE COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE AND PIERROT ......................................................5 2 AMERICAN MINSTRESY AND HARLEQUIN.......................................................14 3 THE POEMS ...............................................................................................................21 CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................................................32 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................33 1 INTRODUCTION Over the course of his lifetime, Langston Hughes wrote numerous poems and works of fiction, successfully stretching his literary prowess to cover countless subjects within multiple genres. Yet even though the Hughes canon comprises poems, short stories, plays, and modernistic amalgamations of these, he remains, in the public sphere, to be known mainly as a blues poet. While this realization is not an intrinsically negative one, for the blues aspects of Hughes’s poetry rightly merit such attention, his works bordering on other specific themes and sequences necessitate just as much study. One specific image that appears in several of his early poems is Pierrot, a stock character that comes out of the Italian commedia dell’arte. According to the convention, a Pierrot, a persona usually depicted as a white-faced, moonstruck clown, speaks directly to American blackface minstrelsy, which also has roots in the commedia tradition. Some of the most interesting qualities of this interplay between the Pierrot and minstrel, however, are its appearance within ten years of Hughes’s career and its quick transformation in tone over time1. Few scholars have paid much attention to these commedia-influenced poems, leaving it fairly uncharted territory. Even Martin Green and John Swan, in their book The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell’Arte and Modern Imagination, cite the poetic use of Pierrot in works by T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Amy Lowell, and Wallace Stevens but fail to mention Hughes’s explicit references to the white-faced clown. Recently, though, Madhuri Deshmukh published an 1 By citing the Pierrot/minstrel poems as being localized within a decade, I refer to their initial publication dates. Though two of the poems appeared later in Fields of Wonder in 1947, Hughes originally published all seven poems between 1923 and 1932. 2 article detailing the aesthetic importance the Pierrot usage has in relation to all of Hughes’s poetry, not just the poems that specifically reference this character. By delving deeply into the theoretical motivations behind Pierrot, she ultimately claims that Fine Clothes to the Jew is “most pierrotic” of his volumes (5). Her article, though making a case more for the subtle Pierrot influence on Fine Clothes than examining the explicit references to the image, as I do in the next few chapters, proffers many connections between the commedia traditions and the particular poems. Deshmukh claims the use of Pierrot in poetry “was a means of recreating the aesthetic space that minstrelsy in the U.S. had stolen from black creativity” (4). Similarly, she sees the mask of Pierrot as culturally important for Hughes’s poetry: In discarding the black mask of minstrelsy and donning the Pierrot mask, Hughes’s transformation of the wistful, tragic clown into Black Pierrot was an act of “signifying” that reversed the nineteenth century American transformation of the commedia into minstrelsy, thus recuperating the realm of aesthetics, traditionally defined in American society as the binary opposite of things black, for black expression. (12) These concepts, then, significantly apply to my forthcoming analysis of the seven poems and their shift in tone and purpose. I hope to take these ideas a step further, however, by looking at the ways the poems mesh characteristics of both the commedia dell’arte and American minstrelsy in order to create the new blended protagonist. This will also help to provide some perspective by which one can view the way Pierrot, a traditionally white clown, relates to the early twentieth century’s African American struggles overall. Before delving into the treatment of Pierrot in these poems, we must have some sort of background in the commedia dell’arte and its influence upon minstrelsy. Then it is helpful to 3 examine more recent portrayals of the Pierrot character. Hughes’s poems reference the traditional idea of Pierrot directly by complying with the prescribed characteristics at times while certain poems deviate very purposefully from the dictated ways in which Pierrot customarily acts. As stated previously, the Pierrot has its origins in Italian commedia, which Robert Storey, a prominent scholar on the history of the figure, defines as “improvised theater . in which a scenario (plot outline) served in place of a script in dialogue. It was performed by a professional company of about a dozen members, each usually fulfilling in play after play an inherited or invented role and seldom straying from the ‘type’ thereby sustained or created” (Storey 4). The first incarnation of Pierrot appeared in Molière’s Don Juan ou Le Festin de Pierre in 1665 after the commedia had made its way to Paris; the original iteration is most likely based on Pedrolino, which I will discuss to a further extent in the next chapter. Of course, at this stage in the history of Pierrot, he is much more comic and naïve than the Pierrot that Hughes reincarnates. The shift in Pierrot’s appearance and personality can be attributed most appropriately to Jean-Gaspard “Baptiste” Deburau, who “has often and justly been acknowledged as the godparent of the multifarious, moonstruck Pierrots who gradually found their way into Romantic, Decadent, and Symbolist literature”; he also spearheaded the “transformation from naïf to neurasthenic pariah,” granting the Pierrot character much more depth and complexity than had previously been the case (94). Though the Pierrot persona became a staple of French commedia in the mid-seventeenth century, it gained rejuvenated popularity two centuries later when poet Jules Laforgue became fascinated with the clowns and began incorporating them into his poetry. Subsequently, the poems influenced more modern poets and artists. More than just a continuation of a popular literary movement to employ the Pierrot poetically, however, Hughes’s poems on this masked 4 figure point specifically to the blackface minstrel tradition of nineteenth century America. The relation between Pierrot and minstrelsy shows itself in multiple ways, possibly the most important of which is their shared origins in the commedia dell’arte. Whereas the Pierrot figure arises from earlier Italian commedia zanni, the American minstrel can be seen as stemming from another zanni, the Harlequin. In a traditional commedia dell’arte scenario, both of these zanni would play the role of comedic relief and could simultaneously fill the roles of the fool and the trickster. Their physical appearances, however, are quite the opposite, as Pierrot sports a white powdered face in stark contrast to Harlequin’s dark mask. As these scenarios evolved in the French commedia, so too did the characters. At the peak of their popular iterations, Harlequin and Pierrot exhibited more contrasting traits than their colored faces. While Harlequin exudes masculinity, Pierrot evinces a subdued femininity. The one displays his sexual prowess, but the other experiences unrequited love. As the former exhibits his strength in nearly every way, the latter withdraws within his sadness. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. counts the similarities between certain harlequinades and