Masculinities in Black and White

Manliness and Whiteness in (African) American Literature

J. Armengol

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137485601
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137482808
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Inverting the traditional focus of ethnic studies on blackness as the object of scrutiny, this book explores dominant forms of white masculinity as seen by African American authors placed alongside certain white writers. Author analyzes texts by Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Frederick Douglass, and James Baldwin.

C H A P T E R 1

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Slavery in Black and White: White Masculinity as Enslaving in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Race and/as Gender in Douglass: An Introduction

Predictably much of the existing critical work on Frederick Douglass’s slave narratives—especially his best-known 1845 Narrative, as well as its sequels My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892), and also his 1852 novella on the revolt aboard the American ship the Creole led by the “Heroic Slave” Madison Washington—has looked at these texts as illustrative of the brutal and unjust nature of the institution of slavery in the old South. Thus, Douglass’s journey from bondage into freedom, as described by himself in his famous autobiographies and in some of his North Star pro-abolitionist articles, has been traditionally celebrated as the recovery of his dignity and, ultimately, his manhood—just as Washington’s resistance to slavery in “The Heroic Slave” has been read as the epitome of black male heroism. Such traditional reading has long been upheld by numerous critics, black and white, male and female. For example, Richard Yarborough has claimed that “no nineteenth-century Afro-American thinker was more concerned with the issue of manhood than Frederick Douglass” (172), just as Nancy Bentley has argued that Douglass explicitly links selfhood to manhood and, especially, to the integrity of an “inviolate body.” Focusing on the famous episode involving the fight between Douglass and the slave-breaker Edward Covey in his 1845 autobiography, Bentley insists that Douglass’s physical challenge to the white man helps the slave regain his self-confidence, thus reviving in him a sense of his own manhood. In this sense, Bentley ends up defining Douglass’s “heroic violence,” exerted through his body and its capacity for force over others, as “the tokens of ‘humanity’ for men in antebellum culture” (213; emphasis added).

Just as Douglass’s celebration of violent resistance as proof of self-worth may be and has indeed been problematized from different perspectives,¹ so have some scholars called into question his equally controversial equation of freedom with humanity. While it may be argued that Douglass’s usage of the terms “man” and “manhood” simply stand for “human” and “humanity,” respectively, there is little doubt that, more often than not, they are charged with gender-specific connotations. This is problematic for several reasons. On the one hand, Douglass’s almost “spiritual” conception of manhood has been found to diminish the (central) role played by women in his life,² with his first wife Anna Murray Douglass being described as “an afterthought” as well as “a rather startling appendage to his escape” (Leverenz 128). Even as biographers have shown how Douglass’s liberation was due, in great part, to his first wife, who organized his flight to freedom, “she was always in her husband’s shadow” (Leak 24). While a public defendant of women’s suffrage and rights, his progressive gender politics did not seem to benefit either his private life or his first wife. “Never,” as Leak insists, “could his manhood be called into question” (27).

On the other hand, it seems clear that the slave’s great efforts to prove his manhood clearly aimed to facilitate his, rather than women’s, access to the privileged world of (white) men and masculinity. Rather than his support for women’s suffrage, black and white, he is actually best remembered for his infamous break with the suffragists when it seemed that black men would get the vote before women of any color. If slavery and racism deprived African-American men of their masculinity, Douglass appears to claim a supposedly universal humanity, implicitly equated with the ideal Anglo-American (white) masculinity, and, in so doing, ends up neglecting his female counterparts. In line with Harper’s already classic description of masculinism as integral to African-American culture and literature, Douglass has thus been recurrently accused of both sexism and gynophobia, as his struggle for freedom and “equality” seems to have excluded black women altogether. “Douglass’s masculine identity,” writes Gwen Bergner, “allows him to desire the authority of white men and to locate the cause of slavery in a loss of inheritance rights” (28).³

For several critics, then, Douglass seemed to establish a one-to-one correspondence between gender and race, that is, between masculinity and whiteness, on the one hand, and femininity and blackness, on the other. Little wonder, then, that he has often been criticized for both excluding black women from his notion of humanity and for adopting an unabashedly assimilationist stance to struggle against the dehumanization of blacks by whites. Such view is perhaps nowhere better expressed than in Richard Yarborough’s study of Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” which he sees as fatally “flawed” for its inability to articulate a “real” definition of black manhood beyond the American ideal of (white) masculinity. More specifically, Yarborough reads the explicit textual references in “The Heroic Slave” to the American Revolution, as well as to two well-known (white) American political leaders such as James Madison and George Washington, as an attempt on Douglass’s part to find “socially approved examples of violent male action” (175). In Yarborough’s view, however, Douglass’s “whitewashing” of male violence, while meant to appeal to white readers and to hopefully transform them into abolitionists, made him totally dependent on white norms. Not only did it oblige him to internalize the codes of Anglo-American bourgeois white masculinity, but it also precipitated him into a “troublesome conceptual trap” (180), since the very figures whose patriotic heritage Douglass claims for his hero were part and parcel of a social order that legitimated the enslavement of blacks such as Washington Madison himself. Unable to question the white bourgeois paradigm of manhood, Douglass, Yarborough concludes, thus leaves us wondering if “the tools of the master can be ever used to achieve the complete liberation of the slave” (183). If, as we have seen, Douglass was blamed for his uncritical adoption of the (white) ideal of masculinity, with black women left behind in bondage, his desire to move and reach a white audience through a “whitewashing” of the black male slave has thus been blamed for disfiguring blackness, too. As a result, he has often been accused of both sexual and racial conservatism, of eclipsing gender and distorting race, of excluding black women and misrepresenting black men.

The view of Frederick Douglass as racially and sexually reactionary may nevertheless be challenged from different critical perspectives. First of all, one must remember the serious limitations imposed on black men in antebellum America. While viewed as unmanly and inferior because they were enslaved, they were also regarded as beasts and otherwise inferior if they rebelled violently. Thus, it was not easy at all for African-American authors such as Douglass, as Yarborough (174) himself has acknowledged, to make their black male parsonages “deserving of sympathy” and at the same time to “celebrate their manhood.” This was even more difficult, perhaps, in Douglass’s case, whose father was an (unknown) white slaveholder but whose mother was a black slave. Given his mixed blood, Douglass must have found it particularly difficult to claim manhood, black or white. If, as a slave, he did not have many positive models of masculinity to emulate, Frederick often seemed to miss a (white) male mentor as well. “For Douglass,” as Leak elaborates, “the absence of birth records and other authenticating documents signified that he did not belong to a community. Conversely, his biracial origins rendered him an ‘outsider’ in both black and white communities” (4).⁴

Equally open to questioning remains the parallel view of Douglass’s works as male-dominated and sexually conservative. Despite the slave’s obsession with achieving manhood and/as freedom, his works are not only peopled with women characters, black and white, but also offer some of the boldest denunciations of slavery as a patriarchal institution. Although recurrently accused of being male-oriented, Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, for example, portrays Aunt Hester’s whipping as central to the plot. Indeed, this bloody episode, which figures prominently in the very first chapter of the narrative, may be said to constitute, to use Gwen Bergner’s psychoanalytic terminology, a “primal scene” (19) in its own right.⁵ Resulting from her master’s jealousy and his suspicion that she is romantically linked to a black slave, Hester’s whipping does indeed reveal the slaveholding system as an eminently patriarchal structure, representing the commodification of black women’s bodies by their white masters for both sexual and (re-)productive purposes. While Douglass’s (non)involvement in the scene has been subject to different interpretations,⁶ there is certainly no denying that the role played by (black) women in the Narrative may be more central than has thus far been generally acknowledged. Even more relevant, perhaps, is to acknowledge his complex and multifaceted depiction of women, black and white. Just as he was very active opposing the abuse of enslaved women and supporting suffrage for all women, irrespective of their race, and just as he made friends with several white abolitionists,⁷ so is a white woman, Mrs. Auld, given a central role in the Narrative. Mrs. Auld teaches Douglass to read and, in so doing, shows a black slave man “the pathway from slavery to freedom” (34).⁸

From what has been argued here, it would appear that Douglass’s racial and gender politics may be more progressive than has been generally acknowledged. My primary aim here, however, is not to provide a redeeming interpretation of Douglass and his works. Nor do I intend to call into question (were it possible) the ambiguous construction of his gendered and racialized fictions. Quite the contrary, my analysis will focus on Douglass’s autobiographical work, particularly his best-known 1845 Narrative, so as to argue his complex, varied, and often even contradictory gender and racial politics. Unlike most of the existing scholarship on Douglass, which has dealt with his construction and representation of black masculinity, I suggest rereading the Narrative with a view to analyzing his (de)construction of white men and masculinities, starting off from the critical assumption that such study may enrich our understanding of the complex gender and race relations, black and white, that pervade his writing. In so doing, I will advance a number of different albeit complementary arguments. First of all, I will argue that even though white (male) slaveholders were obviously responsible for enslaving black people—men and women—this also ended up enslaving, as paradoxically as it may sound, white men themselves. In line with Toni Morrison’s view of racism as distorting “the mind, imagination, and behavior” of both black and white people (Playing 11–12), this chapter is thus intent on expanding the analysis of white supremacy to try to understand what Douglass himself referred to as its “soul-killing effects” (Narrative 19) on masters and slaves alike. If, as we have seen, most of the available scholarship has analyzed Douglass’s struggle to recover his freedom as part and parcel of his attempt to recover his manhood, thus concluding the “feminizing” effect of slavery on black men, I will contend that slavery in Douglass’s Narrative is also shown to “unman” white men themselves by turning them into brutal beasts and, in so doing, depriving them of their own humanity. As a corollary to this argument, I will also explore the dehumanizing effect of slavery on white women, particularly white mistresses. More specifically, my contention will be that as a patriarchal institution, slavery not only promoted white men’s abuse of black women, who were brutally enslaved for both pleasure and (re-)production purposes, but also contributed to the gender (if not racial) subjugation of white women. While it may be true, as Jeffrey B. Leak (23) has argued, that Douglass proves unable to render (black) female experience “beyond its symbolic connection to black male disempowerment,” I do believe, as I hope to demonstrate, that the connection established by Douglass between the disempowerment of (white) women and black men enhances rather than diminishes the historical value of the Narrative. Indeed, Douglass shows, as we shall see, how even if many white women abused their black slaves, their gender—rather than their race, as in the case of black men—involved their inevitable submission to their white husbands, who were thus transformed into their “masters” as well.

While the first part of my argument will focus on the effect of slavery on white masters and mistresses, who were both perpetrators and victims of slavery, the second will deal with its corrosive influence on white working-class men, too. Indeed, I would like to suggest that slavery had a detrimental effect not just on the wealthy minority of white (male) slaveholders but also, and above all, on the majority of the American working class in the nineteenth century, made up mostly of white males. Borrowing from existing scholarship on the making of whiteness and the American working class in the nineteenth century (Allen; Roediger Wages and Towards; Saxton; Babb; Lott; Fredrickson), I will reread Douglass’s Narrative as illustrative not only of the “birth” of whiteness as ideology, but also of the subordination of class to race interests in antebellum America. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate how white working-class men’s assertion of their racial (and gender) supremacy over both black men and women implied their own virtual transformation into white slaves, even if undesired. In this sense, Douglass’s Narrative offers a powerful reminder, as we shall see, that slavery was not always (or completely) equated with race, tracing it back to a time when, in Toni Morrison’s words, whether men “were black or white was less important than what they owned and what their power was.”⁹

White Masters and Mistresses

While much of Douglass criticism has focused on his conception and representation of racial “difference,” much less has been written on his views on whiteness, or his numerous and complex relationships with whites, even though these do play a central role in his life and works. The son of an (unknown) white master, Douglass’s childhood, for example, was marked by his close friendship with Daniel Lloyd, the lonely son of the patriarch of Wye House; he later learned the alphabets thanks to Sophia Auld, who read passages of the Bible to both Frederick and her own son Tommy; used to hang around the docks with a gang of white boys indifferent to slavery; was saved from a lynching mob by William A. White, a Harvard abolitionist “whose head was gashed and teeth knocked out when he saved the already injured Douglass from a possibly lethal blow at the hands of a racist Indiana mob” (Davis 15); returned as a celebrity to the plantation manor, where he was received by a great-grandson of the lord of Wye House; and eventually married a white woman when he was already 66 (Davis 13–15). Yet, as David B. Davis (13) himself reminds us, Douglass also had to undergo the brutalities of slavery, fell prey to the hatred of several racist mobs, and suffered “the more subtle slights and cuts of unconscious racism.” While establishing close ties with several whites, Douglass thus remained a committed political activist against white racism throughout his life, never showing, in Davis’s words, “a betrayal of race” on his part “or even a desire to be white” (14).¹⁰ Mirroring this very ambiguity, Douglass’s Narrative does nothing, as we shall see, but reflect the contradictory representations of whiteness and white people that pervaded his life and works.

Traditionally, scholarship on Douglass has focused on “The Heroic Slave” (1853), his only work of fiction and the first known African-American novella, as the text that most clearly represents its author’s views on black–white relations. Described by John Stauffer as “a handbook or guide for whites” (138), the novella does indeed make a paradigmatic example for Douglass’s confidence in the white man’s capacity for reform, as it shows the influence ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1.  Slavery in Black and White: White Masculinity as Enslaving in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• 2.  Of Gray Vapors and Creeping Clouds: White (Male) Privilege as Blinding in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”
• 3.  Revisiting Masculinity and/as Whiteness in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa and Under Kilimanjaro
• 4.  Dark Objects of Desire: The Blackness of (Homo)Sexuality in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
• 5.  Race and Gender in the Mirror: A (White) Woman’s Look at (Black) Racism in Martha Gellhorn’s “White into Black”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index