Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2001 by Marilyn C. Wesley

Daphne is the very figure of enigma. Her white self, Daphne Monet, is an invented persona which imagines a father who made love to her out of an appreciation of her essential nature, but this belief is contradicted by the incestuous violation she actually experienced as Ruby Green, a little girl of mixed blood. In this doubled character, Mosley reworks the recurrent motif of the "tragic mulatto" through the hardboiled convention of the ambiguous woman. From nineteenth-century slave narratives through the modern novel, the white features of a black female character have guaranteed her abuse at the hands of white men and often provoked her isolation from the black community, a situation that frequently resulted in insanity. She therefore traditionally elicits, according to Valerie Babb, sympathy for "lack of racial identification" (33). [11] Daphne, however, although disturbed, is clearly not a figure of pathos. Instead of testifying to the necessity of maintaining the purity of the races, she suggests the pow er released through violations of the various social and sexual taboos she represents. In addition to confusing racial certainties, the heterosexual relationship between Daphne and Easy is shadowed by the homosexuality inherent in her masculine characteristics and the oedipal violation suggested by her maternal behavior. What Easy searches for--and finds in Daphne--is the transgression of the status quo. His identity as both a black and as a man are open to modification: She "was like a door that had been closed all my life; a door that all of a sudden flung wide and let me in" (182).

The plot reveals Daphne as a murderer, which explains Easy's ultimate rejection of her ("Daphne Monet was death herself. I was glad that she was leaving" [204]) but fails to account for the depth of his conflicting attraction. In the typical noir plot, the detective is drawn to the beautiful temptress whom he finally repudiates as the quintessence of the violent corruption of the world that has shaped her. Easy's ambivalence is, however, related to Daphne's more complex thematic function. As the register of semiotic negation, herself an unclassifiable term, she destabilizes the hierarchical oppositions which both constrain and support Easy as a black man. His love affair with her as a white woman rejects sexually imposed restriction based on an ideology of white superiority, but, at the same time, because this episode invokes the generic convention of the tough-guy hero's sexual potency, it raises questions about an ideology of masculine dominance. Daphne's anarchic potential, her personification of radical freedom, attracts Easy when it threatens white entitlement, but terrifies him when it imperils male privilege. [12]

Unlike the traditional white hardboiled detective who seeks to rejuvenate a transcendent system, Mosley's black detective must experience the pain and the possibility of the fundamental disorder that produces new social arrangements. This key difference is evident in a comparison between Chandler's and Mosley's treatments of the knighthood motif which is the signature characteristic of Philip Marlowe, the "common man" as "hero," who treads "mean streets" as "a man of honor" (Chandler, qtd. in Haycraft 237). In the first pages of The Big Sleep, when Marlowe spots the "stained-glass romance" of a knight's ineffectual rescue of a helpless maiden that decorates the Sternwood mansion, he wryly observes "that if I lived in that house I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying" (4). Just as the king is assisted by the medieval knight in Chandler's 1939 novel, Sternwood, the failing and wealthy patriarch, relies on the loyalty and potency of the detective hero. Ma rlowe's detective code derives from two principles of fealty--loyalty to the client and loyalty to the law--which turn out to be the same thing: perpetuation of the decrepit paternal codes of privilege that it is the duty of the knightly hero to rehabilitate.