Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England.

Kim F. Hall. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. 319 pp. $45.00 cloth/$17.95 paper.

Reviewed by

Dorothy Stephens University of Arkansas 

For any of us who have ever told a student that Shakespeare's sonnets to the dark lady refer only to a brunette, Kim Hall's study of blackness in English Renaissance literature and art provides a welcome corrective. Renaissance scholarship has been slow to investigate issues of race, partly because early modern England did not have a specific vocabulary with which to discuss race. Yet Hall argues convincingly that England did link skin color with a whole complex of values and assumptions. She argues, moreover, that these values and assumptions did not simply run parallel to those associated with gender but intensified when the two systems of cultural difference were superimposed.

Hall explains that in the 1550s, when England became infatuated with the idea of African trade, the tradition of creating order through philosophical polarizations underwent a change. Poets and artists began to arrange such polarizations under the rubrics of blackness and fairness, rather than simply including blackness and fairness as items on a par with other binarisms. Although Christianity had always aligned blackness with evil, African trade gave the old term new baggage: the complicated associations of African servitude, ugliness, and wealth. Because foreign territory had become identified with blackness, however, sexual otherness often ended up on this side of the binary divide, as well: In some contexts, both African and English women were "Ethiops." Likewise, feared populations could be labeled "black," whether they were American, Indian, Spanish, Irish, or Welsh. Hall contends that, in all of these cases, the trope of blackness "draws its power from England's ongoing negotiations of African difference."

The physical presence of Africans in England remained small during the Renaissance, but Africa's significance loomed large. Nor was this significance restricted to metaphor; English adventurers pirated Portuguese slave ships, and English women wore jewels from Africa. One of Hall's chapters looks at the Petrarchan fashion of the dark lady, and another looks at the economics of trade in African goods, yet Hall links these chapters by observing trenchantly that the class of men who attempted to "make" themselves by participating in or funding voyages was the same class that constructed itself through the circulation of sonnets. More importantly, these chapters (and others) speak to each other by means of Hall's well-placed reminders that commercial goods could serve metaphorical purposes and that poems or paintings could serve commercial ones.

Hall demonstrates that English travel narratives interweave concerns about African otherness with concerns about feminine instability. These narratives represent the African continent and African bodies as chaotic fluxes in need of English rule, yet they also comment upon the unruliness of all women, who are "the downfall of family, government, empire, and civilization." The male body remains pure, while white female and black bodies compete for significance, suggesting the authors' stake in maintaining a gender difference that underscores their own distance from contamination. Morally, African blackness creates these men's purity; economically, their possession of African ivory sets them apart as white rulers. Hall suggests that, while "the search for foreign treasure is haunted by a search for the self," it is also haunted by a fear of recognizing oneself in blackness. Descriptions of uprisings in England resemble the travelers' descriptions of supposedly bestial "Moors," suggesting that, as England expanded, it worried that it might become indistinguishable from the seductive other.

Petrarchan sonnets, Hall contends, speak directly to such economic and status anxieties rather than simply making use of similar metaphors. To praise the "black" features of one's English mistress is to demonstrate the power of both poet and nation to create fairness, performing the proverbially impossible feat of washing an Ethiope. (In Love's Labours Lost, Berowne says of his "ebony" Rosaline, "I'll prove her fair, or talk till doomsday.") Sonneteers represent themselves as poor to demonstrate their ability to "create wealth from the mistress herself," thus "mask[ing] the desire for foreign gold under an appreciation for the 'home-grown' wealth of the sonnet mistress."

Occasionally Hall's theoretical horses run away with her, as when she extrapolates from Derrida that Sidney's poetry desires "an ordered, stable language rather than the dark, unconquered territory of slippery linguistic 'alienness.' "Such a theory takes Astrophil perversely at face value. Although Astrophil does claim to eschew foreign models, Sidney clearly expects us to see the humor in his having based his entire sonnet sequence upon the slippery work of that foreigner Petrarch. Hall's discussion of Sidney is further marred by her misunderstanding of Sidneian "imitation," which she takes to be mere copying and thus a strategy for avoiding alien strangeness.

Much more persuasive is her discussion of instability in the sonneteers' sunburn metaphors. A male speaker's sunburn results from his struggle with Phoebus; his mistress's sunburn reveals her susceptibility to alien eroticism. Yet it is difficult to maintain the desired demarcation between these two uses of the metaphor; when the sonneteer worships his beloved, he suspiciously resembles the African sun-worshiper. Sonneteers attempt to circumvent this danger by raising the dark lady from a representation of bodily and material wealth into the spiritual realm. Hall contrasts these spiritualizing poems with Herbert's "Aethiopissa" and its imitators, which praise literal, material, bodily blackness. As an appendix, this book includes a splendid collection of such poems, but Hall devotes only a few pages to analyzing them. Her sense that this group of poems attempts to "remove the mystery of blackness by literalizing and exhausting its tropes" is provocative, and one could wish for more on the subject.

Using Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and The Devil's Law-Case as exploratory texts, Hall investigates the ways in which the colonialist enterprise combines with the economics of marriage to destabilize class boundaries within England: Foreign booty enables merchants to buy the signs of nobility and to marry above themselves. Although Elizabeth tries to rid England of "Moors" while James and Anne generate a court fad of "Moorish" entertainments, "both gestures work to protect the fragile sense of group identity threatened by decreasing geographic isolation."

Queen Anne's role in planning Jonson's Masque of Blackness has been played down, but Hall takes it seriously. Pointing out that Blackness often alludes to England's imperial aspirations, Hall speculates that Anne's request for a masque in blackface may have stemmed from her dissatisfaction at being far from the center of English power. In the sense that Petrarchism makes a woman black or fair only in comparison to other women, "all women were 'black' in King James's court"; only James's male favorites were fair. By constructing a black otherness, Anne could position herself more centrally. Yet Anne did not actually write the masque, and Jonson ultimately assigns the power "to blanch an Ethiop" to the sun, standing for James. Women who wrote did use racialized language for their own purposes, however. Hall argues powerfully that female writers recognized the movable nature of racialized aesthetics and often focused on race as a way of moving themselves into a privileged category by comparison: Though they were not powerful as women, they could claim authority as whites, as members of the nobility, and as inhabitants of England. Cary's Tragedy of Miriam vibrates with new significance when Hall points out that, in Herod's absence, the various female characters compete with each other for power by attempting to prove themselves "fair" in relation to their opponents' national, racial, and religious identities.

The late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century aristocratic fashion of representing Africans in jewelry and in oils is the subject of Hall's final and best chapter. Strikingly, this chapter asserts that the materiality of these objects matches the materiality of black slaves brought to England as status symbols to be dressed in exotic costumes and displayed by their owners. Hall's examination of hinged cameos that layered black and white faces on their various surfaces is itself too intricately layered to summarize in this short space; perhaps the best example of the delight and usefulness of this discussion is a moment in which Hall describes a wedding cameo with a woman's black face outside and the couple's white faces inside as giving "added resonance to the declaration that opens Shakespeare's sonnets: 'From fairest creatures we desire increase'" (emphasis Hall's).

The fashion for cameos was replaced by the fashion of having one's portrait painted with a black slave, usually an elegantly dressed child. The aristocrats in most of these portraits are women whose white skin is set into glowing relief by their slaves' black skin. Poignantly, Hall notes that museum catalogues often describe such portraits as having only one subject each: "Black people literally become shadow, the key effect in chiaroscuro." Taking exception to critics who have implied that women's interest in being portrayed with black boys is indicative of a sexual pathology, Hall counters that the youthful slaves' sex is often indeterminate and that they represent the aristocratic women's rewriting of the standard sexual politics that aligned white women with Africans. In these portraits, Hall says, the slave children can "represent 'race' in a seemingly ungendered way that leaves the sitters free to construct masculinity and femininity." Yet whereas the portraits of both white men and white women tend to proclaim their power over a "domesticated" otherness, those of the women also tend to hint that they and the slaves share a subservience and an object position in relation to men. The slaves in these paintings often hold out pearls, coral, or other valuables to their mistresses, and Hall elegantly points out that these riches are not simply metaphors. They come from Africa; they are ingredients in the cosmetics that make women "fair"; they and the women who display them signify England's aspirations to empire.

One could quarrel with some of Hall's generalizations throughout the volume; these can seem at first unfounded or even naive when no supporting evidence or specific formulations immediately surface. Yet the supporting evidence usually does turn up several pages later, and it usually pays off well. Less frequent, but more disturbing, is Hall's tendency to refer to Shakespeare's sonnets as though all of them were written to the "dark lady." She clearly knows that most of the sonnets speak to a young man, but her book blinks its way past homoeroticism, using these sonnets and James's court simply as material for her explanations of the relationships between femininity and blackness in the Renaissance. But despite such oversights, this is a rewarding and groundbreaking volume. Hall addresses a truly impressive array of texts and paintings, and readers will certainly be able to use her conclusions profitably in the context of other works that she does not mention.