Shades of Difference

Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England

Sujata Iyengar

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812202335
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Renaissance européenne

Was there such a thing as a modern notion of race in the English Renaissance, and, if so, was skin color its necessary marker? In fact, early modern texts described human beings of various national origins—including English—as turning white, brown, tawny, black, green, or red for any number of reasons, from the effects of the sun's rays or imbalance of the bodily humors to sexual desire or the application of makeup. It is in this cultural environment that the seventeenth-century London Gazette used the term "black" to describe both dark-skinned African runaways and dark-haired Britons, such as Scots, who are now unquestioningly conceived of as "white."In Shades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, "race, " embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contexts—historical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis." By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender, Shades of Difference furthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship.

I

Ethiopian Histories

Chapter 1

Pictures of Andromeda Naked

Heliodorus’s Greek romance, Aithiopika or Ethiopian Story (ES, 230–275 CE), has obsessed scholars and critics in three historical periods: the English Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, and our own era.¹ It narrates the difficulty of reading the body, in particular, that of its heroine, Chariclea, born fair-skinned to the dark-skinned King Hydaspes and Queen Persina of Ethiopia because her mother gazed upon a religious icon—a picture of their white-skinned ancestress and deity Andromeda—during conception. Secretly exposed at birth by Persina (who fears the imputation of adultery), raised by a succession of foster fathers, during the course of the novel Chariclea falls in love with a young Thes-salian, Theagenes, and eventually returns to Ethiopia, where her royal father fails to recognize her and attempts to sacrifice the lovers to the gods. In a dramatic recognition scene, the oral testimony of her Ethiopian foster father, the written account of Persina’s letter, the physical evidence of the jewels, signet ring, and swaddling clothes left with the baby, the painted proof of the picture, and the bodily evidence of Chariclea’s birthmark finally convince Hydaspes that this fair-skinned Greek girl is indeed his daughter. The romance concludes with the lovers’ marriage and the abolition of all human sacrifice in Ethiopia.

Three moments stand out particularly within the Aithiopika as challenges to stable methods of reading the body and its heredity. The religious oracle informing Theagenes and Chariclea of their Ethiopian destiny, Persina’s explanatory letter to Chariclea, with its description of the picture of Andromeda, and Chariclea’s birthmark, the final proof of her Ethiopian and royal heritage, all undermine seemingly transparent differences of skin color and sex. Even the heroine whose picture Chariclea supposedly resembles, Andromeda, turns out to be racially ambiguous, both black- and white-skinned, in classical and early modern accounts. In this chapter I compare the treatment of these episodes in early modern translations and adaptations of Chariclea’s story: Thomas Underdowne’s .!Ethiopian Historie (AH, 1569); William Lisle’s The Faire Ethiopian (FE, 1631); the anonymous, unpublished Caroline play The White Ethiopian (WE) ;Jacques Amyot’s French Histoire Aethiopique (Histoire, 1559), and john Gough’s The Strange Discovery (SD, 1640).²

Underdowne’s lively translation, the first in English, was probably used by Shakespeare (who refers to the Aithiopika in Twelfth Night), Philip and Mary Sidney (whose revised Arcadia borrows its embedded narrative structure and some specific plot points from Heliodorus’s romance), and possibly Abraham Fraunce. Both Amyot and Underdowne intend a translation that is explicitly accurate or “perfect” and implicitly timeless, “a patterne,” like Morte Darthur and Amadis de Gaule, as Underdowne’s preface to the 1587 edition maintains (AH, A2v-A3r). Both translators, however, locate their story firmly in their own sixteenth-century worlds, betraying contemporary beliefs about magical conceptions, fantastic kingdoms, and unlikely coincidences. The seventeenth-century adaptations, too, lie open to close literary readings with broad cultural resonances surrounding their treatment of race, skin, and sex.

Chariclea’s increasing pallor in these versions corresponds to new and fluctuating ways of understanding gender and inherited physical characteristics, including skin color, in the early modern period. Thomas Laqueur has argued that early modern culture imagined male and female existing on a single bodily continuum, and gender as a potentially mutable category. At the same time, medical writers such as Helkiah Crooke challenged the old one-sex model and reinterpreted Galen to argue for the prevalence of two separate and distinct genders. Crooke insists in Microcosmographia (1615) that sexual difference is not “essentiall” but “accidental,” and that women are perfect in their own sex, but his categories are fixed and unchanging.³ Race, as we have seen and will continue to see, is likewise under scrutiny. Heliodorus provides a bodily hermeneutics that is independent of skin color. Instead, he depends upon an understanding of race both as an inherited “genos” or lineage and as a social category—a race that can only come into existence once it is recognized. But seventeenth-century versions of his novel find the blackness of the Ethiopian royal family to be problematic. Underdowne maintains, with Heliodorus, that Chariclea’s sex and origins are indeterminate for most of the novel, until materialized through her actions. Chariclea’s translation to Africa makes her black; falling in love makes her female and heterosexual. But Lisle and Gough strive to diminish the radical ambiguity of Heliodorus’s novel. Their adaptations stabilize Chariclea’s sex and race through her heredity rather than through her actions, asserting her social rank and forcing it to match her skin tone by retroactively blanching her parents—and Chariclea herself.

This shift in understanding skin color corresponds to a generic transformation. Underdowne, following Heliodorus, maintains that “art can breake nature” (AH, M3r)—a fundamental tenet of romantic wonder. Renaissance adaptations of Heliodorus foreground the ways in which early modern culture begins to regard Chariclea’s pallor and her parents’ darkness as the most miraculous or romantic paradox of Heliodorus’s plot, more fabulous than even the other unlikely events of the romance, including shipwrecks, oracles, human sacrifice, and infants restored after exposure. The treatments of Chariclea’s story, and Crooke’s and others’ explanations of skin color, mingle residual mythologies of color—classical myths of Ethiopian princes and princesses, travelers’ tales about Ethiopian religious practices, theories of “maternal impression”—with emergent medical explanations of heredity and pseudoscientific understandings of race as biological inheritance.

Reading the Aithiopika

A modern critic explains the novel’s appeal to African American writers, arguing that it offers alternative cultural models and a different literary lineage by overturning “The valence of the skin colours familiar from America … [T]he aristocracy is black, and it is the white body which shows up as aberrant… cast out and ultimately subjected through battering and enslavement to control.”⁴ Another similarly claims that the Aithiopika renders whiteness both spectacular and spectacularly unwanted.⁵ Some commentators argue that any supposed blackening or Ethiopianizing of Chariclea and Theagenes represents rather a blanching or Hellenization of the Ethiopians (symbolized by the latter’s ultimate abolition of human sacrifice, seemingly as a direct result of their encounter with the Hellenized Chariclea and the Greek-born Theagenes).⁶ As Arthur Heiserman observes, the novel counters this suggestion by satirizing the superstition of “Delphian Apollo,” epitomized by Chariclea’s “foolish” Greek foster father Charicles.⁷ In addition, Charidea does not plead against the custom of human sacrifice in itself but merely that she, as a royal daughter, should not be its victim. The motion against human sacrifice comes from the thoroughly Ethiopian Sisimithres, Chariclea’s first foster father, who is “black as [he] could be” (ES, 403) and who, with his fellow gymnosophists (“naked sages”), urges both the king and the Ethiopian people against religious murder. Sacrifice, he argues, whether human or animal, is “barbaric … nor do we believe that is pleasing to the divinity” (ES, 565). The gymnosophists were traditionally based in India, but Heliodorus draws upon Philostratus’s account of a group of Ethiopian sages who brought gymnosophist teachings back to Ethiopia to emphasize not a Greek but an Eastern tradition of respect for human and animal life.⁸

These religious traditions not only prohibit the taking of life but also urge its active preservation. This is why, says Sisimithres, he saved the exposed infant Chariclea in the first place: “once a soul had taken human form it would have been a sin for me to pass it by in its hour of peril—this is the sole precept of the naked sages of my country, to whose teaching I had recently been admitted” (ES, 404). Sisimithres later argues that class, caste, and color should have no bearing on justice when Hydaspes objects to hearing out Chariclea. Hydaspes’s objections are twofold: first, her rank (she is a slave and a prisoner, while he is a king), and second, her supposed origin (she is a foreigner, and not, he says, protected by Ethiopian law). “‘For a wise man,’ retort[s] Sisimithres, ‘a person’s character is as important as the color of his face in reaching a judgment’” (ES, 566).

Brigitte Egger observes that the Aithiopika challenges our assumptions about heredity by questioning the meaning of fatherhood.⁹ Each of Chariclea’s foster fathers represents a different aspect of paternity. Hydaspes, her biological father, is the king who begets her but does not know of her survival. Sisimithres, her first foster father, is the compassionate Ethiopian gymnosophist who rescues her from exposure. Charicles, her adoptive father, is the childless Greek priest who names her “Chariclea” after himself, raises her to adulthood, and tries to arrange her marriage to his nephew. Calasiris, her spiritual father, is the wise Egyptian divine who reveals to her the secret of her birth and encourages her to flee to Ethiopia with Theagenes. Of all Chariclea’s foster fathers, only Sisimithres is “the ideal sage”; both Charicles and Calasiris prove to be inadequate fathers, Charicles because he is weak and Calasiris because he is devious.¹⁰ Only Sisimithres and the Ethiopian gymnosophist tradition he represents can provide a model for an Ethiopia that is “Utopia.”¹¹

So deep is the author’s sympathetic identification with a utopian Ethiopia that some classicists believe that Heliodorus may himself have been a Hellenized black African.¹² Even skeptics (who argue that the author is more likely to have been a Phoenician from Syria, bilingual in Greek and “a Semitic language”) observe that this writer’s self-chosen name means “gift of the sun.”¹³ The author concludes with a description of his own genealogy from “the clan of descendants of the Sun” in order to connect his own heliocentric cult with the sun-worshipping Ethiopians and the peace-loving gymnosophists (ES, 588). In the following sections, I discuss the oracle, the letter, and the birthmark in detail, beginning with Morgan’s standard English translation and comparing it to early modern appropriations.

Reading the Oracle

The mysterious Delphic oracle in the Aithiopika pronounces:

One who starts in grace and ends in glory, another goddess-born:

Of these I bid you have regard, 0 Delphi!

Leaving my temple here and cleaving Ocean’s swelling tides,

To the black land of the sun will they travel,

Where they will reap the reward of those whose lives are passed in virtue:

A crown of white on brows of black. (ES, 409)

Chariclea’s name means “Glorious Grace,” Theagenes’s, “Goddess-begotten.”¹⁴ Ethiopia may be “black,” in an epithet transferred from its Ethiopian population or from its parched terrain, and called “the land of the sun” because of its proximity to the equator and its fierce climate. A 1961 translation gives “they shall win and wear … A white coronal from darkling brows,” retaining the participle but transferring its blackness from the winners to the losers, implying that the coronal or crown is given to the lovers at the Ethiopians’ expense, and alluding to Chariclea’s being “in the dark,” as it were, about her own origins.¹⁵ Selden argues that the final Greek line of the oracle translates literally as “a white crown shall be affixed on blackening brows,” employing the present participle, melainomenon (μελαινομενον), blackening, to indicate, as John Hilton writes, “at the very least the recognition of the indeterminacy of race.”¹⁶ The indirect structure of the story further emphasizes race as a social, rather than a biological, function. At one point in Book Two, during Calasiris’s account of Chariclea’s childhood, we are hearing a narrative embedded “at three removes, as Cnemon hears from Calasiris what Charicles had told him he had heard from [Sisimithres].”¹⁷ Chariclea and Theagenes begin the romance as white Greeks and finish it as black Ethiopians through an illuminating story glimpsed through a glass darkly,...