Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Morrison considers Edgar Allen Poe’s novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in which a native named Nu-Nu dies and Peter and Pym, who are also on the same boat, pass through the white curtain of a waterfall. It is the whiteness, the conclusion of the book states, that kills the black man.

Morrison believes that “[n]o early American writer is more important to the concept of African Americanism than Poe” (32). In Poe’s novella, a white shape rises up to meet the characters after the death of the black character. Such white forms are common in literature, especially in the conclusions to text, in which they often appear alongside black figures who mare dead or rendered impotent. Morrison writes that the white forms are a commentary and kind of “antidote” (33) to the shadowy presence of black figures.

Why was this gothic literature replicated in the New World? Morrison posits that it might have been an attempt to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. She also writes that it was an attempt to escape their fear of freedom, ironically what they most coveted. Romantic literature could not escape from what Poe called “the power of blackness” (37). The enslaved black population was the source of meditations on what it was like not to be free. The idea of man’s rights connected to the ideas of Africanism. Nothing made the ideas of freedom as clear as slavery did. To rationalize slavery and to allay the fears of whites, Africanism emerged in its American form (European countries have a different version of Africanism).

Literature used the Africanist persona to create a sense of mirroring and to exorcise white fears. The quest of early American literature was to construct the idea of the “new white man” (39), and to do so, writers sought not only to contrast Americans with Europeans but also to contrast the white self with the concept of Africanism.

Morrison includes a long excerpt from Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West about the Scottish immigrant William Dunbar, who settled on the American frontier, what Bailyn refers to as a “half-savage world” (42). Morrison notes the odd “pairings” (42), or juxtapositions, in Dunbar’s world—including his belief in Enlightenment ideals alongside his position as a slave owner as well as his superior European education alongside his New World venture as a frontiersman in Mississippi. Morrison writes that although Dunbar’s life in Scotland and London provided him with a superior education, it did not provide him with the kind of freedom and autonomy that his life in Mississippi did. He is born again in the New World, a different man with the freedom to completely control the lives of others.

Morrison writes that the background of Africanism made the emergence of a new American identity possible. The power that men like Dunbar had to exert in a “half-savage world” turned their autonomy into individualism and their newness into innocence. They viewed their inhabited world as savage because there was a bound population against which men like Dunbar gauged their own freedom.

Eventually, American individualism became a force that made Americans solitary and malcontent. Still, they convinced themselves that the savagery didn’t exist within themselves but in the Africanist presence around them. In turn, they viewed African Americans’ desires to escape to freedom as irrational. These contradictions are part of American literature.

The fact that people state that race is not present in early American literature is itself a racial act, Morrison writes. Just because one wants something to be raceless does not make it so. Even when American texts are not about the Africanist presence, the presence makes itself felt in signs. As Morrison explains, “the shadow hovers” (46-47).

Africanism is critical to the metaphor of what it means to be American. The word “American,” Morrison writes, connotes whiteness. As Americans did not have a nobility to fall back on for their self-definition, they negotiated this definition in the same way Dunbar did: by defining themselves against the backdrop of mythological Africanism. This definition became essential to ideas about the body, love, freedom, ethics, and morality.

Morrison writes that it is essential to map the process by which Africanism developed in the national literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson called for a national literature, and this call was answered in a way that was full of the Africanist persona. Americans had to define themselves as different not only from the Old World but also from slaves. American slaves had a different color, and Americans had long ascribed values to color.

Morrison looks at the Africanist character as a surrogate and enabler, one that, as in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, helps define the frontier. Africanism is a force by which other authors, such as Twain and Hawthorne, define and regulate love, and Africanism is a way in which whites can define themselves as free and powerful.

Morrison also wants further investigation into how the Africanist idiom is used to define difference and later to signal modernity. For example, texts feature unintelligible dialogue of black characters that stands for an alien presence as well as illicit sexuality. Historically, this black idiom asserts white power and privilege, and in modern times, is used to sound hip and sophisticated.

have not recognized the work’s suggestion that freedom and slavery are inextricable from each other. Critics have struggled with the end of the novel, which some see as a collapse of Twain’s literary power. Instead, Morrison writes that Huck can only be free if Jim remains enslaved. Jim remains enamored of his white masters, an expression of the white desire for forgiveness. After Jim has emerged as a real man with real feelings, Huck and Tom Sawyer torture him at the end of the book. Such an ending would not, Morrison writes, been conceivable for a white man. The book points to what she calls “the parasitical nature of white freedom” (57). That is, blacks must be enslaved for whites to be free.

Poe’s stories, including “The Gold-Bug,” Pym, and “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” also include notions of the other in the hands of the author, who had pretensions to be a member of the planter class. Poe’s devices include “estranging language” (58) and stereotypes, but there are moments, such as the black slave who whips his master in “The Gold-Bug,” that interrupt this narrative.