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

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Dorothy Stephens

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.