We Wear the Mask

 F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote "there are no second acts in American lives."  There are multiple ways of interpreting that statement, and one way is to see it as a statement on the impermanence of American identity.  That is, we constantly shift and re-invent who we are.  Somehow that ability came to be built into our national character as something we cultivate and cherish.  This is amply demonstrated by the endless supply of celebrities and politicians who screw up, publicly apologize and swear they've changed--and we endlessly believe them.  To not believe them would be to not believe the American possibilities for re-invention and personal redemption.  (One of the best literary examples of identify re-invention in an American setting is Fitzgerald's own novel, The Great Gatsby.)

So what does any of this have to do with Phillis Wheatley's poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America"?  Few groups in our history have had to endure re-invention--both forced and self-willed--as African-Americans.  Slavery, for example, involved more than economic oppression and forced labor; it also involved attempting to force a slave identity upon the slaves (as Douglass pointed out in his narrative).  But as is often the case, slaves, as a culturally marginalized and so culturally powerless group, frequently developed a subversive identity:  a surface image to present to those in power, that would hide what was going on beneath the image.  The black philosopher and sociologist W.E.B. Dubois called it "double consciousness": the need for African-Americans to be simultaneously aware of their own identities and how white culture looked at them, and thus be ready to shift identities depending upon the context.  As the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar put it, "we wear the mask that grins and lies."

At first reading Wheatley's poem can seem more than a little problematic, at least for contemporary readers who presume to be enlightened.  Her identification of Africa as a pagan land (and consequently carrying with it all the pejoratives that come with the word "pagan" to Christian readers), her simile comparing Negros to the blackness of Cain (thus effectively associating both Blacks and the word "black" with sin and outcast), and her use of the word "mercy" to describe being taken from Africa to America have all been reasons for readers to dismiss or ignore Wheatley.  And no doubt these perceptions helped make her something of a poetry superstar in her own time, able to rub elbows with the elite of American culture (including people like Jefferson, Franklin and George Washington).  Her fame had little to do with appreciation for her aesthetic talents; it had more to do with her role as a poster child for the rightness of the philosophies of the Age of Reason.  That this ex-slave could write poetry bore witness to the fundamental possibilities for all humans to succeed, if circumstances allowed it.  But likely few if any white readers (and that's who her readers were going to be) thought her revolutionary in her ideas--and that was just fine.

But I don't think Wheatley is that simple, or should be so easily dismissed.  First, I think we need to recognize that her point in writing the poem is not to praise her christianization, but to chastise those who would call themselves Christian but behave otherwise.  In that way she is in line with John Winthrop, in that she is reminding her readers (again, the majority would be white Christians) how Christians are supposed to behave--not what to believe, but how to behave, how to act on those beliefs.  In essence she is calling them to task for politicizing their faith--that is, using their faith to engage in an act of political power.  This perhaps reveals a profound level of irony in the poem.  As Wheatley says, Negros are perceived as black as Cain; the associations between blackness and sin are embedded in the word "black" itself.  Yet it is the Black woman who needs to remind the white Christians just who they are supposed to be. 

We might, then, see this poem as a kind of mask.  The opening lines are perhaps the mask that grins, the mask that makes the viewer/reader comfortable, the mask that enables her to bring the reader into the poem, where she can then smack them with their own hypocrisy.

One of the more intriguing aspects of "Rip Van Winkle" is that among all of the literature we produced during what was arguably one of the greatest periods of literary production in America--the era of Romanticism--one of the very few characters that has emerged and endured as a pop culture icon has been Rip Van Winkle.  (Interestingly enough, another of Irving's creations, Ichabod Crane, has also done pretty well on the pop culture circuit).  I find this significant because something becomes iconic in pop culture when it speaks to something we value, something we want, something we want to be.  Keep in mind that Rip Van Winkle hasn't been a shooting star, lasting briefly then flaming out.  It's been almost 200 years since the story was published, and we still know the name and basic story of Rip Van Winkle, even if we've never actually read the story.  But what really makes this interesting is that the character of Rip would seem to stand against everything we presume to be central to American character.  All you need to do is think for a moment how the Puritans would have regarded a person such as Rip.



The story does have a significance beyond that of the character of Rip, and it's revealed in the opening of the story: the foregrounding of the American landscape in Irving's description and use of the Catskill Mountains.  In an earlier post I mentioned that one way American writers answered the call for an idiosyncratic American literature was to celebrate our landscape, which was perceived as meaningfully different (in look and value) from the Old World landscape.  In this story before Irving ever calls our attention to the main characters, he sets the reader into an identifiably American landscape, and a landscape that would serve both as setting and metaphor.

But no doubt, this story is about Rip.  In many ways Rip can elicit similar polar reactions as those elicited by Bartleby.  On the one hand Rip seems to be little more than a lump, and quite happy to be that.  He violates virtually everything our Puritan heritage has taught us about a work ethic and the moral value of work.  Before we at least partially excuse him for having to endure a shrewish wife, I think we have to consider that she has a point in her complaints.  After all, he seems willing to help others outside of the family, but would rather go on a 20 year bender than actually do something for his own house and family.  One thing to recognize in this story is that we see things as Rip sees them, not as his wife sees them.  And it doesn't take an intimate knowledge of Puritan values to imagine how they would react to a man who willfully leaves his family to indulge in drunken excess.

But that being said, things still are not that simple.  There's the nagging fact I mentioned before--for someone who seems so anti-American in character, he sure has enjoyed longstanding popularity.  And before you say that the popularity is because we can look at him and feel good about ourselves because we're not like him, there's that other even more nagging fact: Rip comes back from his bender, and becomes ... famous and respected.  Let me emphasize this--he has done nothing, he has accomplished nothing, and he becomes famous and respected.  Somehow he has managed to re-invent himself, which is indeed an American characteristic, but has re-invented himself by basically sleeping one off.

So this leads to a question similar to that which we asked of Bartleby.  Is Rip an example of individualism taken to an heroic degree?  He does, after all, seem to have the characteristics common to other rugged individualists in our culture and literature.  First, he has the ability to move at will.  Second, he refuses to behave according to social convention, and so perhaps presents a threat to society and social order.  Third, he defines his worth no according to how others outside of him perceive him, but according to his own internal values.

While many of the settlers who first came to this land came to explore new commercial possibilities, the Puritans came here to re-invent their world.  The new world that would become America offered more than an escape from oppression; it also offered the promise of a new start, with which they could leave behind their troubled past and begin again the process of redemption.  It was no accident that for many Puritans the new world was a second Garden of Eden (metaphorically speaking), a place where they could correct past mistakes of the original fall from grace.  The notion of re-defining and re-building the self, then, is embedded in our cultural origins.

Few writers in our history have better spoken to that ability to build a new self than Ben Franklin (though ironically enough, Franklin was about as far away from living the puritanical life as a person could be).  Franklin's autobiography (one of the best-selling books in our literary history) really is not so much about presenting an historically accurate portrayal of Franklin's life as it is about presenting a model for an American type.  Franklin's autobiography was published not long after our successful revolution, when we had basically cut the umbilical cord that tied us to the old world.  This, in combination with the new ideas abounding from the Age of Reason, helped shape a world that was both exhilarating and terrifying in its newness.  That the recommendations he was making about how to shape one's character had little bearing on the way he himself behaved was, frankly, irrelevant.  (Franklin was quite the hedonist.)  What was relevant was that Franklin was providing a scientific, programmed method for achieving character best-suited for this brave new world of post-revolutionary America.  The Puritans may have provided a scheme for proper character in the 17th century, but Franklin was providing his readers a way to redefine themselves and American character for the Age of Reason.

We conveniently like to think that autobiographies are self-histories, presumably objective retellings of the events of one's life.  In fact, autobiographies are notoriously selective, and in Franklin's time the purpose of an autobiography was not to offer verisimilitude, but to function as an exemplum--an example of how to live one's life.  Originally, an exemplum offered the path to live a life proximate to the life of Christ, but Franklin had little interest in matters of faith and religion.  His notion of exemplum had more to do with creating a model for secular success in a newly-minted America.  Franklin was not pulling his concepts of success out of thin air, but gauging them according to the needs of this new country.  So one thing to think about is how his design for proper character would fill what was needed in post-Revolutionary America. 

 Two of the Heirs to Franklin's Values for Self-Creation

I would also emphasize the significance of the charts Franklin creates.  They don't just simply make things easy to follow; they create a programmed, scientific, empirical method for achieving personal success.  In other words, Franklin rejects the notion of innate depravity and predestination dear to the Puritans in favor of the possibility that one could build a new self, and build one systematically.  If any of you are familiar with the plethora of self-help books that have come out in the last couple of decades or so--things like Five Minutes to.... or One Hundred Habits of Successful ..., etc. etc., you're not seeing anything new; Franklin was playing that shell game 200 years ago.