Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Carolyn Sorisio

What is particularly interesting about Keckley's descriptions of the freed woman whose "extravagant" demands include two pairs of undergarments is that it appears in the same chapter that introduces the topic of Mary Todd Lincoln's debts. Keckley notes that the First Lady, "in endeavoring to make a display becoming to her exalted position," had to incur many expenses that she kept hidden from her husband. All totaled, Keckley claims these debts to amount to the staggering sum of $27,000. The irony of Mary Todd Lincoln's extravagance in the face of the freed woman's simple request is left to speak for itself. Keckley proceeds to include Mary Todd Lincoln's comment that there was "more at stake" in the reelection than Abraham Lincoln dreamed of, because if he were not reelected her debts would come to light (149). The inclusion of these comments might give readers pause, especially as they follow descriptions of former slaves in Washington. How could Mary Todd Lincoln compare the great needs of the Union durin g the devastation of the war with her personal debt? How could there be any more "at stake" in the war than the future of the slaves and the future of the nation? A reader could certainly question who was really more fit for freedom, the former slave woman or the former First Lady.

While the subject of slavery seems more historically profound than any scandal Mary Todd Lincoln could momentarily stir up, through her text's pattern of juxtaposing the narratives of white and African American women, Keckley demonstrates the importance of interrogating the relationship between white and black womanhood in the reconstructing nation. The two central topics of Keckley's narrative, then, are connected by more than just the historical fact that she worked for Mary Todd Lincoln; they interrogate the racial and symbolic order that justified enslavement and defined class and social status in postbellum America. One way she does so, as I describe below, is by claiming her own gentility and unmasking the genteel performance of white women such as Mary Todd Lincoln. However, as my above description of Keckley's embrace of capitalism indicates, Keckley also altered the perceived roles of white and African American women in the postbellum period through her representation of herself as a successful prop rietor. As Behind the Scenes demonstrates, slavery forced most African American women into the commodified realm, while at the same time relegating many white women (at least symbolically or ideally) to the home, a sphere envisioned as removed from the marketplace and crowned with sincerity and gentility. [10] This twist of history, Keckley suggests throughout her narrative, left African American women particularly well-suited for an economic role in postbellum culture.

However, if Keckley carves a place for former slaves and African American women in the public sphere by juxtaposing her resourcefulness with the ineptitude of white "ladies," she still has to struggle with stereotypical and harmful associations of the African American woman as ungenteel and publicly accessible. After all, many antebellum Americans considered slave and free African American women's bodies as public property. The perception of their public status, all too often interconnected with harmful stereotypes of their alleged sexual availability, made any claims to true womanhood, to a private self, difficult to maintain. Therefore, Behind the Scenes cannot be read solely as an unproblematic representation of Keckley's triumphant rise from property to proprietor. Rather, Keckley points at times to her discomfort with certain aspects of commodification in the public realm, and her desire to distance herself from an uninterrogated acceptance of public commodity culture. Although Keckley certainly embrace s capitalism, she develops strategies to enter into the public space of authorship and proprietorship while asserting a private, non-commodified, and genteel self.