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

The Mask of Gentility

The juxtaposition of Keckley's and Lincoln's lives becomes more evident when one considers the tension between privacy and revelation in Behind the Scenes. Scholars note Keckley's seeming reticence about disclosing the personal facts of her life in slavery and after emancipation. In an argument relevant to my own, Rafia Zafar investigates Keckley's crafting of a "literary veil" to protect "the black female narrator from any scrutiny save one suitable for a black woman conscious of her tenuous status within middle-class American society" (153). [11] Indeed, Keckley tells us in the first paragraph of her Preface that "much has been omitted, but nothing has been exaggerated" (xi). That Keckley has selected facts and events to omit is significant enough for her to repeat in the first chapter, when she says that because she "cannot condense," she "must omit many strange passages in" her history (18). By asserting her power to omit, Keckley claims the dual roles of author and editor; she indicates that she has fina l say over what she will reveal in her text and what she will leave veiled. Doing so, she reverses rhetorically the racial dynamic of textual exposure that often appeared in antebellum antislavery texts. Much antislavery rhetoric written by white women was based on the dynamic similar to that described by Lydia Maria Child in her editor's preface to Jacobs's Incidents. Here, Child assumes responsibility for "presenting" the "monstrous features" of slavery to readers with the "veil withdrawn." But what she reveals is the corporeal secrets of Jacobs's personal history. By contrast, Keckley takes it upon herself to insist that the "veil of mystery must be drawn aside" from Mary Todd Lincoln's actions (xiv). Rather than unveiling the secrets of African American or slave women, Keckley withdraws the veil from the face of Mary Todd Lincoln's false gentility, exposing her to the public's gaze.

Keckley's awareness of the power of an author to veil and reveal is also evident when she describes her husband, a man who misrepresented himself to Keckley and led a life of "dissipation." In a move characteristic of her reluctance to reveal aspects of her personal life, Keckley tells very little about him, commenting that "he had his faults, but over these faults death has drawn a veil" (64; emphasis mine). But of course it is Keckley who has the power to let the veil remain intact or to rip it away. In this case, because it involves her own life and, perhaps, because it involves an African American, she elects nondisclosure. As Zafar argues, Behind the Scenes contains an "intriguing double-veiling" that can be found in the writing of other African American women, as the authors "withdraw the veil from the frivolous and self-centered nature of their white women employers at the same time they draw the veil over their own lives" (154). Examples of Keckley's unwillingness to reveal herself to the public's vi ew can be found throughout her narrative, and a few suffice to demonstrate what we can identify as her strategic reticence. Chapter Two, "Girlhood and its Sorrows," divulges the most corporeally specific details about Keckley's life in slavery. In this chapter, Keckley reveals the cruel treatment she received at the home of Mr. Burwell, a man whom she identifies as a Presbyterian minister. Although she describes some of the beatings she received at Mrs. Burwell's prompting, she tells readers that she "will not dwell on the bitter anguish" of the hours after her beatings, "for even the thought of them now makes me shudder" (38). Just as Keckley refuses to "dwell" on her torture, so too does she "not care to dwell upon" the subject of the sexual abuse that resulted in her son. That Keckley refuses to comment in depth (or apologize at all) for her son is typical of her representations of him throughout her text, which are scarcely present and always reserved.