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Race and Early Modern Studies: The Power of an Illusion and Its Genesis

Posted on: Sunday, 14 November 2004, 03:00 CST

Race and Early Modern Studies: The Power of an Illusion and Its Genesis

Women and Race in Early Modern Texts. By Joyce Green MacDonald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ix + 188 pages.

English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. By Mary Floyd- Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xii + 256 pages.

The issue of race is now receiving widespread attention in early modern studies and has become a remarkably fruitful field of research. This scholarship acquired new energy in the late 1980s because of calls by critics within the Black Feminist movement, African American studies, and Black British studies for more attention to race, and, often, its relation to gender and class. The field has also sparked interest because of a surprisingly difficult question: how can scholars attend properly to issues of race and its implications in a period before the term acquired its modern meaning of biological difference, developed through the scientific racism of the early nineteenth century? How did the early modern period contribute to the development of modern racism?

Since most scientists now reject the claim of biological difference, the history of the idea of race implies that one is dealing with the "power of an illusion," as the American PBS series puts it, or a construction, according to cultural critics. Some scholars like Joyce MacDonald, whose book is reviewed here, refuse to evacuate the term entirely, since the effects of racism are so concretely material, including white supremacy, and because "shared experience" creates material differences (23). But she also agrees that race has a "fluidity," especially in early modern texts and culture, which requires specific analysis to understand its meaning and effect (18).

The books reviewed below share some noteworthy aspects. Both refuse to focus not only on people of color as raced, but instead analyze the significance of whiteness for cultural and gender identity, and for the development of Britain as a nation. In addition, both demonstrate that aspects of Africa and Africans were purposely forgotten in the early modern period to sustain the development of England as the leader in the slave-trade. The books are also interestingly different. Floyd-Wilson focuses on theories of the body to argue that modern beliefs about race have obscured from view the relatively positive medieval and early modern European notions about Africa, which changed as the slave trade developed. On the other hand, MacDonald juxtaposes analysis of the theater in England with an argument about law, ideology, and social practice in the colonies to demonstrate that the new definition of white womanhood depended on the treatment of enslaved African women. These outstanding books lead one to appreciate the virtues in each method, but also to consider which method will be most productive for the significant amount of work still left to be done on these issues.

MacDonald traces the disappearance of dark-skinned women in early modern texts, which often turn African women white. Considering drama primarily, she argues that this metamorphosis served the interests of early colonialism by indoctrinating English female spectators into a model of white womanhood as domestic, maternal, sentimental, and sexually pure, an ideology which facilitated and justified the sexual and economic exploitation of nonEuropean women in the colonies. The position offered to these spectators was constructed by the drama as gendered, since it taught obedience to patrilinear authority, but also raced, because it taught English women their moral superiority to others.

MacDonald analyzes representations of Cleopatra in early modern texts and some recent accounts to make visible the whiteness that in large part determines these portraits. In her translation of Robert Garnier's Antonie (1592), Mary Sidney creates an exemplary and sexually pure Cleopatra, but that character is also represented as white. On the other hand, Samuel Daniel's Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius (1599) and Tragedie of Cleopatra (1602) structure the Egyptian queen's racialized difference as a challenge to "rightful" European imperial rule. Daniel's account is similar to William Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece (1593-94), which also racializes female chastity as white in contrast with the barbaric tyranny and "black blood" of Tarquin (42). The significance of this is brought home through a consideration of a set of modern texts: Henry Louis Gates's disagreement with Afrocentric claims that Cleopatra was black ("Beyond the Culture Wars," Profession [1993], 6- 11), and the criticism of Martin Bernal's Black Athena (1987) by classicist Mary Lefkowitz (Not Out of Africa [1996]). MacDonald argues that, whereas Gates is right to take issue with such "transhistorical" identifications on the basis of skin color, Lefkowitz is quite wrong to dismiss, simply because Cleopatra may not have been black, Afrocentrist claims that Europe is traditionally and unjustly put at the center of all scholarship (27, 35). MacDonald asks whether skin color is synonymous with race, and argues that Lefkowitz is ignoring the more significant claim that the Hellenic world was strongly influenced by African culture. As an alternative, MacDonald considers Shelley Haley's account of her journey from an all-black community into a preprofessional career as a classicist, where the work of black people and women were denigrated, and Haley's subsequent struggle to reevaluate her education through considering the possibility of Cleopatra's blackness with her students ("Black Feminist Thought and Classics" in Feminist Theory and the Classics [1993] ). MacDonald shows that, in the work of Sidney, Daniel, and Lefkowitz, white European interests determine what is considered normal and legitimate- whether in imperial rule or historical methodology.

In opposition to the recurring claim that race is insignificant in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1606-07), MacDonald argues that the play uses racial difference to explode traditional views of the couple. She demonstrates that, whereas Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam (1613) places a brown Cleopatra offstage to highlight the white-skinned, chaste heroine Mariam, Shakespeare's play racializes cultural difference to imagine an alternative order. Antony's vision of the couple as an immortal Dido and Aeneas rewrites the masculinist certainties of the epic, illuminates the weakness in Roman identity, and "alters the pattern of gender and racial dominance" inherent to early modern texts with African queens (67). MacDonald also considers other literary works, including Thomas May's translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (1631), John Fletcher's The False One (c. 1620), and John Dryden's All for Love (1678), which either obscure issues of empire by focusing on gender and sexuality or explore them by coordinating Cleopatra with the land she rules. MacDonald suggests that the paucity of black actresses playing Cleopatra may result from anxieties about interracial couples on stage and from the desire to limit expressions of difference (in race and sexuality) within an acceptable Anglicized range.

Dido and Sophonisba of Carthage are analyzed as African women defeated by Rome, but whose stories announce the central importance of the exchange of women and racial purity to the development of empire. Although Carthage is a reminder of the instability of Roman power, Dido is actually a mirror of Aeneas in her founding of a new city, and, to some extent, in her marriage practices. Other sources aside from the Aeneid (19 BCE) stress her fidelity to her father and first husband and her willingness to kill herself rather than marry a Moorish prince. Just as Aeneas rejects Dido, so Dido rejects Iarbas for the sake of racial purity. MacDonald's account of other sources on Dido is quite useful, especially in her discussion of the reference in the Tempest (1611) to Ausonius's virtuous "widow Dido" (74). Except for the multitude of texts already in the mix, one could wish for a consideration of Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587). Stories of Sophonisba, Hannibal's niece, by Petrarch (c.1338), John Marston (1606), Thomas Nabbes (1635), Nathaniel Lee (1676), and Joseph Addison (1713), reveal that this African princess most often appears with blue eyes and blonde hair, but the racial difference in Livy's text (trans. Holland, 1600) is displaced onto the men surrounding her. The sensuality of Sophonisba's African lovers yields to Roman self-discipline, but the story at the center is the formation of bonds between men that maintain empire.

The chapters on the character Imoinda originating in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) bring to fruition the issue of the exclusion of dark- skinned women from early modern texts. As many have pointed out, the black African Imoinda in Aphra Behn's prose fiction turns white in Thomas Southern's drama (1696). MacDonald also considers other white Imoindas. But most importantly, she provides a fascinating and illuminating account of the legal and social treatment of women in the colonies to demonstrate that the English theater as well as the institution of slavery were in the business of constructing "wh\ite women's endangered sexual purity" in opposition to "black women's innate whorishness" (95). Colonial law in Virginia declared mothers not fathers to be the legal source of lineage; thus white slaveowners had no responsibility for the children they produced through their abuse of enslaved African women. A "Suriname marriage" was conventional in the colony but shocking to British observers because of the concubines of color that European men regularly kept (96). Eliminating the black African Imoinda on stage was a "cultural act of forgetting" which facilitated "explicitly racist goals" (99, 93). Thus the family could take on its universalized shape according to ideals of white womanhood, while the colonies' racialization of family relations and acceptance of the abuse of African women were put out of sight. Slavery was presented to European women viewers in terms of the sentiment appropriate for the abolitionist movement and as free from sexual coercion. These plays universalized the white nuclear family just as white western feminists' notions of patriarchy silence the experiences of black women (92).

In her last two chapters, MacDonald considers the emergence of women writers and their implication in the ideal of white womanhood. Katherine Phillips's play Pompey (1667) is analyzed for Phillips's identification with Pompey's wife Cornelia in opposition to the promiscuous foreign queen Cleopatra. So Phillips authorizes herself as a writer by affirming white womanhood in terms of restraint, self- denial, circumspection, freedom from ambition, and a chastely self- disciplined empire. MacDonald counters praise of Aphra Behn's play Abdelazar (1676) for its disruption of race and gender stereotypes, and demonstrates that the play's defeat of its central character, the Moorish lover of a Spanish queen, affirms chastity, patrilinearity, and racial segregation. MacDonald also takes issue with Janet Todd's complaint that race has unjustly trumped gender in critical analysis of Behn and thus interfered with the recovery of the texts and reputations of white women writers ("Anglo-American Difference," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 12 [1993]). MacDonald argues quite convincingly that Todd's definition of race restricts it inaccurately to non-whites, and that analyzing gender in relation to race would require feminists to make visible the whiteness of the authors they celebrate.

The book would benefit from the consideration of fewer texts and less condensed writing. The extraordinary scope of the work made it at times difficult to follow. Nevertheless, it is filled with valuable analysis, and the central argument-that the idealization of white womanhood on stage facilitated the abuse of non-European enslaved women in the colonies-is a model for studies of the intersection of gender and race, and a major contribution to the field.

Floyd-Wilson's introduction quotes a passage from Othello (1603- 04) which calls into question our beliefs about early modern notions of Africans, and the book offers strong evidence that these beliefs have to be significantly revised. When confronted with the claim that Othello is jealous, Desdemona answers, "I think the sun where he was born/ Drew all such humours from him" (3.4.28-29). Although critics have traditionally dismissed this statement as Desdemona's inability to accept the truth about violently heated Africans, Floyd- Wilson demonstrates that Desdemona's view was based on a time- honored Aristotelian theory about the relationship between environment, climate and the "humors," that mixture of bodily elements that determined personal disposition. Calling the theory "geohumoralism," Floyd-Wilson argues that it defined for centuries the ethnicity of south and the north as extremes in opposition to a temperate middle, namely Greece and Rome (2). From this perspective, Africa and England had a great deal in common: they were both primitive and barbaric, but in inverted ways. Whereas England's cold climate sealed up the pores, kept the hot and moist humors within, and gave rise to warm-blooded, strong, but slow-witted people, Africa's warm climate drew out the warm humors, and left people cool and dry, that is, dispassionate, intelligent, but physically weak and cowardly. Thus Africa was linked with wisdom, piety, philosophy, prophecy, and genial melancholy, and not with sexual passion (6). Africa was no ideal; its extremes in temperature led to a lack of "blood" just as the north led to a lack of coolness. Greece and Rome provided the norm because they included all humors in right balance; it was no coincidence that these civilizations were the originators of this theory.

Floyd-Wilson argues compellingly that this perspective was inherently in conflict with the development of the slave trade because the theory attributed significant value to people throughout Africa. She disagrees with Winthrop Jordan's classic account of the shock the English received on seeing dark-skinned people in Africa in the 1550s, and their resulting obsession with color, since English familiarity with geohumoral accounts led to "a reshuffling of old knowledge under new pressures" (7). Being "white" according to the older theory was not a sign of superiority, but of an uncivilized extreme. Jordan's famous title White over Black (1968) misrepresents the tripartite structure that prevailed in the earlier theory. Floyd-Wilson traces in the book the process by which the English began to refute the geohumoral view, and to reshape the tripartite structure into a simple binary, thereby redefining whiteness and Englishness as the new norm. This transformation occurred by exchanging the geohumoral theory of color variation for a focus on blackness as an anomaly, a scientific mystery. This was accompanied by the religious view that blackness was the result of the curse of Ham. These new views, she claims, helped to justify the slave trade.

The first part of the book lays out these fascinating claims and their implications: scholars have mistaken sunburn as the climate theory's explanation for dark skin, whereas the belief was that the sun draws out heat and moisture, leaving the body externally black. Greeks and Romans made no claims that Africans were overly sexualized; if anything, they were seen as verging on impotence whereas it was the northerners, including the English, who were seen as licentious. This illuminates the characters of Aaron in Titus Andronicus (1592-94) and Morocco in Merchant of Venice (1596-97): Aaron is less interested in sex than the northerner Tamora, and Portia may actually fear Morocco's impotence rather than his excess heat. The British were defined not only as warlike and courageous (Edmund Spenser and others link them with Scythians), but also impressionable, inconstant, and vulnerable to outside influences. Self-fashioning, then, included the process of overcoming the incivility and extremes of the northern disposition. The goal of the temperate body had implications for class and gender, because it made the ideal of aristocratic masculinity so elusive and difficult to maintain. The vogue for melancholy in England included a desire for African qualities that the English lacked: firmness and wisdom. But this vogue, which defined blackness as internal rather than external, was also part of the process by which the tripartite structure was transformed into a simple binary. The geohumoral theorists Jean Bodin (1606), Juan Huarte (1594), and Pierre Charron (1612) redefined the classical view to celebrate their own countries. English writers like William Harrison (1587) and Robert Burton (1621) rejected the negative representation of the British and developed a new ideal. As they claimed independence from environmental theories, they developed the notion of the autonomous body, which was defined as white. The melancholy of Hamlet and his alienation from his northern disposition is analyzed as part of this trend. This autonomy emerged at the same time that nonfluid categories of racialism took shape. Finally Floyd-Wilson is convincing in her analysis of Francis Bacon (1627) and Thomas Browne (1646) as natural philosophers who redefined blackness as no natural result of environment but as a scientific mystery. She cites Carolus Linneaus's System of Nature (1758) as signaling the end of geohumoralism and the beginning of modern scientific racism: Europeans are united under the rubric "fair" and Africans associated with the qualities originally attributed to the English.

In the second part of the book, on "English ethnographic theatre," Floyd-Wilson brings to light surprising aspects of well- known texts. Tamburlaine (1587) celebrates the Scythian aspects of the British character. Tamburlaine's rise from shepherd to ruler includes a reassessment and rejection of the Mediterranean claim to superiority. The union of Zenocrate from Egypt and Tamburlaine from Scythia defeats the tripartite structure. Other writers like Burton and Samuel Daniel, and other texts mentioning Tamburlaine, are shown to be making similar arguments. In the chapter on Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness (1604), Jonson's work is seen as dramatizing the association between blackness and wisdom, as well as the transmission of southern wisdom and culture to a region that eventually grants them external whiteness. The daughters of Niger and their pilgrimage to England refer indirectly to the Egyptian lineage that the Scots claimed, as well as to the Picts' painted bodies. The masque therefore comments on King James's plans for unification between England and Scotland. "Blackening" and "blanching" were powers of the Scottish monarch, either requiring military duty from subjects or replacing it with a nominal fee (116). Dudley Carleton's famous complaint about the ugliness of court ladies painted black could refer to his own opposition to unification. The masque offers whiteness to the Scots as \the shared and temperate complexion of all the inhabitants of Britannia.

In the chapter on Othello, Floyd-Wilson makes one of her most ambitious claims, that the play represents the clash between a dominant classical and medieval geohumoral view and an emergent racial discourse about Africans. Although Othello begins as a dispassionate, constant man, less moved by sexual passion than Desdemona, he ends as the "civic monster," the barbarian moved by violent blood (135). This argument challenges the widely held view that Othello's original calm represents the thin veneer of his western civility, which, under pressure from Iago, gives way to reveal the savagery within. Rather, according to Floyd-Wilson, Iago completely transforms Othello's humors. This movement toward racialism continues in Cymbeline (1609-10). The play joins William Camden, in Remains Concerning Britaine (1605), in celebrating the influx of Anglo-Saxon blood into a Britain potentially degenerating through Roman influence, thereby creating a set of English roots that defy the passage of time. Hidden away in Wales, Innogen's brothers reside in a world removed from British historiography where they remain racially pure. The play considers again the unification of Scotland and England through the characters of Posthumous and Innogen, and Posthumous, like the Scots, must admit he is British in order for the union to properly take place.

On the whole this book is remarkable in its analysis and implications. It changes the way one reads established texts. It provides a clear, practical answer to the question of what attitudes existed before modern scientific racism. However, a few problems need to be mentioned. It is hard to believe that the geohumoral view of Africans as dispassionate and cowardly was the only possible European perspective during these periods, given Aaron's passionate appetite for revenge (Titus Andronicus 2.3.39), Morocco's martial might, and Othello's reputation as a valiant general. The belief in Africans as capable soldiers may have been influenced by Hannibal's powerful aggression against Rome; in any case, the geohumoral model does not seem to be able to explain the combination of qualities in Shakespeare's African men. This makes it difficult to believe that the image of the licentious African is entirely an early modern development. Floyd-Wilson needs to take into account some of the characters considered by MacDonald, particularly Cleopatra and Dido, who are linked with excessive sexuality as early as Virgil. Finally, the argument is not convincing that, whereas the geohumoral theory stood staunchly in the way of the slave-trade, beliefs in the curse of Ham as the source of blackness replaced these views, and supported the development of slavery. As Winthrop D. Jordan states in White over Black, the curse of Ham was probably more often denied than accepted during this period. Benjamin Braude affirms that the idea of the curse developed during this time, rather than earlier, as some have claimed, but Braude expressly states he is not trying to identify the ideological origins of racism or the slave-trade ("The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods," William and Mary Quarterly 54 [1997]: 104). Floyd-Wilson also claims that the geohumoral view was displaced by the notion that blackness was a scientific mystery rather than the natural result of the environment; this is far more convincing. It seems likely that the geohumoral view was replaced by a combination of attitudes and practices. Arguments like Floyd-Wilson's account of an ideological shift are intriguing and needed because they attempt to uncover the beginnings of race, or "racialization," views in the period that turn in the direction of the discourse of race that only firmly takes shape in early nineteenth-century science. However, this argument could have used more analysis of the relationship between ideology and social and economic practices in Africa, England, and the colonies. At times the book turns into a version of intellectual history.

This is without doubt an important book. However, its account of the geohumoral body would have been more convincing if, at times, it had also used MacDonald's method-analyzing literature in relation to social and economic practices.

Bates College

Lewiston, Maine

Copyright Indiana University-Purdue University Summer 2004

Source: Clio

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