Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England.

Royster, Francesca T.

Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England

By Sujata Iyengar Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005

Sujata Iyengar's Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England arrives at a particularly fruitful moment in the development of early modern race studies, where the field is now large enough, and its place in publishing, conferences, and the classroom secure enough, to withstand complexity and sometimes divergence of approach. One key point of divergence is the status of racialism and racism in the early modern period. The recent work of scholars Kim Hall, Peter Erickson, Jyotsna Singh, Joyce Green MacDonald, Arthur Little, and Dympna Callahan make central an analysis of racism and/or racialism to their understanding of the period and of the field of early modern studies. This branch of early modern race studies has a forward- and backward-looking reach, focusing on the presence and impact of African, Native American, Indian and Irish bodies as they register on the early modern English literary imagination and official writings: ethnographies, laws, scientific treatises and policies, plays, masques, and poems, as well as an explicit analysis of the racialized politics of the field. For example, in Shakespeare Jungle Fever (2000), Arthur Little defines the "jungle" as those notions of racial and sexual difference repressed and chastised out of visibility in early modern culture as well as our current academic conversations: "The institutional and official foundations of culture are essentially chastised ones. In other words, culture (so defined) becomes legible when read with, through, and against those moments it chooses to forget. If culture names itself through anything, it is through the moment it obliterates, the histories it erases, the institutional hands it does not admit or does not know it owns, the bodies it pretends not to see or doesn't" (9).

Other early modern scholars, including Emily Barrels, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and Gary Taylor, decenter England's engagement with colonialism and the slave trade, to focus primarily on the often contradictory notions of white ethnic and/or racial identity as it merges with other forms of identity, including religion, sexuality, and nation. These texts often broach the subject of an English "racialism" with some reserve. Mary Floyd-Wilson, for example, argues that

 In focusing on England's eventual commitment to the Atlantic slave
 trade and on those aspects of early modern discourse that
 subjugated Africans, denigrated blackness, and helped to naturalize
 a link between color and slavery, we have overlooked an
 ethnological history that failed to predict the outcome that we now
 know. English Ethnicity resists recapitulating the accession of
 white over black. It attempts instead to retrieve the
 counterintuitive notions of ethnicity and "race"
 that the now-dominant narrative of oppression aimed to erase: the
 representations of northern "whiteness" and English identity as
 barbaric, marginalized, and mutable, and the long-neglected
 perceptions of "blackness" as a sign of wisdom, spiritualize, and
 resolution. Readings that ignore such expressions of ethnic and
 racial differences risk confirming, rather than historicizing, the
 normative status of whiteness and Englishness. (11)

Might we acknowledge the unsteady production of white identity in the period while at the same time identify emerging racist or racialist ideas in early modern English culture and the continuing impact of such thought? Iyengar's central point of contention with this question might be with my use of the word "emerging." Iyengar resists a sense of a development "toward" a racist or racialist trajectory, and therefore a sense of a "stable" racial meaning for the period: "Unlike work that tries to find a specific historical or disciplinary point for the emergence of race as a color-coded classification, mine insists that the terms of race and racialism cannot and should not be treated as pure or hermetic categories" (1). She is interested in the ways that literary affiliations entangle and complicate racial mythologies and forms of thinking, calling on Raymond Williams's concept of the "structure of feeling," the distilled residue of past and present lived experience of a community, as bracketed from the institutional and ideological organization of the society. Racialized thinking of the period is seemingly idiosyncratic and decidedly unstable. Williams's concept allows Iyengar to study literary structure and genre as it interacts with power in a nonstatic way. In this way, Shades of Difference might be seen as a bridge between the two sets of conversations on racialism and racism:

 Early modern ethnic prejudice, xenophobia, and color prejudice,
 pernicious as they were, comprised a different structure of
 feeling from modern pseudoscientific racialism. We can by all
 means point out the existence of, and the preconditions for,
 racialism and color prejudice, but we should also acknowledge the
 competing structures of feeling that battle it, reinforce it, and
 (in the Renaissance) are ultimately quashed by it. Otherwise, we
 end up creating a version of history that is static and closed,
 rather than dynamic and open, a history that cannot take account
 of change and multiplicity. (15)

In Shades of Difference, Iyengar presents a stunningly layered and subtle study of early modern notions of race, embodiment, and skin color in literary, geographic, and historic texts, including the biblical Song of Songs, Ben Jonson's masques, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Richard Jobson's travel narrative The Golden Trade, and Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World.

In her introduction, Iyengar asks how the early modern investment in form, or "kind," relates to the classification of racial, as well as ethnic, national, gender, and sexual difference. Iyengar suggests that literary affiliations necessarily entangle with the changing concepts of skin color and emergent racial thinking to sometimes produce and other times curtail new forms of thinking. The investment in form--in distinguishing between "fictional and nonfictional modes, between 'poesy' and didacticism, between delight and instruction" (3) of early modern writers--is a kind of power. It is a community-making and breaking move. Focusing on both kinds of "kind," human variation and literary genre, she unveils through a variety of texts the ways that literary enterprise might always be thought of on the cusp of cultural change, at times recalling the thinking of the past, sometimes reflecting the present, and ultimately betraying the constraints of the genres of previous forms to create the new, in the future: "The alignment of various nonsystematic xenophobias--mythologies of color, nationality, religion, class and gender--into a coherent mythology of race is an emergent structure of feeling in the sixteenth century, a structure of feeling that grows stronger throughout the eighteenth" (4). She closes the introduction with a case study, focusing on the curse of Cham--the legend about Noah's son utilized by medieval and early modern writers to explain the moral origins of blackness. Iyengar focuses on George Best's commentary on the book of Genesis, collected in Hakluyt's Principle Navigations (1598-1600) and Sir Thomas Browne's essay "On the Blacknesse of Negroes," from Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), two generically mixed texts that vie between travel writing, spiritual/moral/mythological/fantastical essay, and scientific essay. These texts are foundational in early modern race studies. Iyengar argues that rather than offering a coherent or singular set of thinking, these two texts, when brought together, "indicate the conflict between a residual mythology of color and an emergent myth of race" (8). Iyengar argues that these essays admit a kind of wonder, resisting the strategies of mastery of their authors. Blackness itself remains opaque. Iyengar notes that the very notion of blackness as opaque and mysterious is an important aspect of its fetishization (10), a point also made earlier by Kim Hall in Things of Darkness: Early Modern Economies of Race and Gender (1995) and Christopher Miller in Blank Darkness (1985). Shifts in racialized thinking, as well as in genre, occur gradually, and often incompletely, Iyengar argues.

Iyengar structures her book into three parts: "Ethiopian Histories," which looks at Renaissance transmissions of ancient texts' representations of blackness; "Whiteness Visible," which looks at mythologies of color, including those on whiteness, fairness, blushing, and blackness and blackface as they signify in erotic narrative poems like Venus and Adonis; and "Travail Narratives," which considers mythologies of race, wonder, and labor in travel diaries. The structure of the book takes a roughly chronological shape, though sometimes making connections that flow backwards and forwards in history.

In chapter 1, "Pictures of Andromeda Naked," Iyengar considers the influence of Heliodorus's Greek romance Aithiopika or Ethiopian Story (230-275 CE) on several early modern translations and adaptations. Legitimized by its association with classical writing, Ethiopia is an important site for early modern intelligence about Africa and is one of the (few) African locations that identifies Africans and blackness with civility and social order. Iyengar's analysis is rich in examples, including Thomas Underdowne's Aethiopian Historie (1569); William Lisle's The Faire Ethiopian (1631); an anonymous, unpublished play from the Caroline era, White Ethiopian; Jacques Amyot's French Histoire Aethiopique; and John Gough's The Strange Discovery; as well as a brief discussion of African American writers' interest in the romance during the Harlem Renaissance. Most important to Iyengar's analysis are three episodes within the romance: when Theagenes and Chariclea are told of their Ethiopian destiny by a religious oracle; Persina's letter to Chariclea, which describes in vivid detail the physical image of Andromeda as dark or black; and Chariclea's birthmark, the ultimate sign of her royal, Ethiopian heritage. These episodes, all related in some way to color, reading, and heredity, create complex and often contradictory treatments of differences in skin color and sex. Iyengar is interested in Chariclea's increasing pallor as we move from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and the ways that this whiteness is intertwined with the romance's concern with gender and rank. Throughout the chapter, Iyengar looks closely at the textures of specific translations, including shifting translations of the Greek passages that identify Chariclea's racial identity and appearance. She moves with agility from these close readings to more general analyses of cultural and generic shifts, including changing ways that the body is made to bear out gendered and racialized notions of desire and innocence in the romance, including, scars, blushing, and perspiration. As I've noted, Iyengar argues in her introduction and elsewhere for a nonlinear reading of history that avoids identifying a movement "toward" racism/racialization; yet her evidence in this chapter points us to an increasing insistence for more stable racial markers for early modern writers, though language sometimes betrays them. Over the course of the chapter, we see the ways that ancient mythologies of blackness are transmogrified over the course of the early modern period and, by the seventeenth century, betrays "a desire for a world in which skin color is stable and readable as a sign of ethnic origin, moral character, and sexual chastity" (42).

In her second chapter, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bride," Iyengar continues her discussion of the early modern translation of ancient texts--here the Hebrew biblical Song of Songs, Canticles, or Song of Solomon. For Iyengar, the Song of Songs' "black but comely" bride is important generically as a precursor to the early modern anti-Petrarchan lyric, and "in particular, to the startling reversals of the Shakespearean sonnet" (44). The poem is important in terms of our notions of early modern racial mythologies in that, like the Aithiopika's Chariclea, the Bride's ambiguous skin color (and the ambiguous readings of her skin color) as both "black, but comely" and "black and comely" is entangled with shifting notions of her beauty, rank, and nation. Iyengar gives a breathtaking span of strategies for reading the bride--thirteen, in fact--from the bride through the lens of ancient and early modern "melaninophobia" (here, Iyengar steadfastly avoids the language of racism or white supremacy) to Bride as Church, to the Bride and poem as an example of the utility of poetry for Protestant thinkers. Unlike the Zen relativism of Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," Iyengar does guide us toward a mode of reading the poem: as lyric. If we read (as early modern secular poets did) the Song of Songs as a lyric, or series of lyrics, rather than as a series of narrative poem, she argues, we find that "the progress from black to fair is by no means straightforward; it celebrates an ongoing moment of conflict rather than a chronological transformation" (45).

Chapter 3, "Masquing Blackness," moves us back to a discussion of specific places and populaces. Here, Iyengqar investigates Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness, Masque of Beauty, The Gypsy Metamorphosed, The Irish Masque, as well as Thomas Chapman's Memorable Masque, as signs of "the early modern relationship between emerging national identities and residual theories of skin color through a comparison of three strange lands imagined as potential colonies by the Jacobean court masque--early modern Ethiopia, Ireland and Virginia" (79). Viewing the masques as both artistic and explicitly political displays, performed for King James VII's court, Iyengar assesses their ability to effect "colonial transformations." (79). Iyengar very usefully expands the commentary on the Masque's treatments of racial identity by comparing representations between black Africans and the "othered" populations of Native Americans and Irish. While the Masque of Blackness participates in an emerging discourse of "race" (which for Iyengar combines mythologies of skin color, hierarchy, and lineage), the productions on Irish and Native groups are more difficult to racialize because of inconsistent nomenclature of color. For example, in Chapman's Memorable Masque, which commemorated the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, Elector Palatine, "Indian Slaves," possibly played by the black Moor grooms in the household, are converted to be Christian citizens. (Given the relative obscurity of Chapman's masque, compared to Jonson's, a more full exposition would be helpful here.) And the images of the Irish participate in a "tribal xenophobia," which sometimes uses reverse hierarchies of "recuperable Irish whiteness" and African blackness, here making the Africans "civilized, wealthy and convertible" (81). (Here, I'd be interested in hearing the potential links between the British view of the Irish as "contestably white" and their "becoming whiteness" in the United States, as chronicled in Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White.) Iyengar concludes by suggesting that "early modern Africans are marked not only by differences but also by important similarities to other 'heathenishe' nations, to other 'ancient' and 'ethnic' civilizations, and even to the English themselves" (99). This, she argues, demonstrates the ways that early modern racial nomenclature was in progress.

Blushing, and its moral, religious, racial, and erotic overtones, is the subject of chapters 4, "Heroic Blushing," and 5, "Blackface and Blushface." Blushing, Iyengar argues, has typically been a sign of the disciplining of social and secret selves. "Blushing transforms even bad intentions into goodly acts, individual emotion into social order" (106) by making shameful or otherwise embarrassing thoughts readable to the gaze of others. We might also think of the blush as a sign of textual ambiguity, when words fail, and when a writer wants to mark that failure of sufficient words. For example, according to critic Christopher Ricks, when Milton's Raphael blushes when Adam asks him if spirits love by touch (in Paradise Lost, 8.6.619), he blushes to convey his lack of certainty of the innocence of angelic love, which in turn creates a gap in the text. For Marlowe, in his "Hero and Leander" and "Hero and Leander Completed," Iyengar argues in chapter 4, the battle between skin tones, blushingly red, pale white, and black, are markers of "the struggle of narrative poetry to give birth to lyric" (103). In his creating of a new, and less transparent, form, Marlowe's blushes "defy the moral codes of gender and desire that they are supposed to regulate, replacing a narrative of shame with an erotic poetics of the body" (103-4). Chapter 5 continues the moral construction of blushing (and implicitly, whiteness) linking it more concretely with early modern theatricality and gender. Here, her central texts are Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing (c. 1598), the anonymous Lust's Dominion (c.1599), and John Webster's The White Devil (1612), read in the context of antitheatrical discourse and contemporary debates around face painting. If Much Ado "demonstrates that the platonic or ideal blush makes for early reading, but a fallen, earthly flush is a free-floating sign detached not only from personal but also from public meaning as well" (123), Lusts Dominion and The White Devil make use of the notion of a readable blush as a sign of the power of the theater to create illusions.

Iyengar closes her section on whiteness with her sixth chapter, "Whiteness as Sexual Difference." In this chapter, Iyengar compares the generic mixture of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, which she calls "an abortive eypllion," and Barnfield's The Affectionate Shepheard, "a failed pastoral eclogue," with mixture and/ or ambiguity of sexual identity and skin color. In this chapter, we see perhaps most clearly the ways that genre is closely aligned with racial and sexual "kinds" or categories. Venus and Adonis, she argues, calls upon a hermaphroditic attraction for readers of both sexes by foregrounding "the act or the art of reading poetry and its similarity to interpreting gender difference" (140). The poem also uses culturally agreed-upon codes of skin color to mark the shifting sexual identities of both Venus and Adonis. For example, the poem makes Adonis "green" with lovesickness, inverting the traditional feminine code, in order to emphasize Venus's power as aggressor and interpreter of Adonis's body and moral state. While Venus is first referred to as "love sick" (line 175), or "like a bold-fac'd suitor" (line 6), it is Adonis who is associated with the green complexion of a lovesick girl or effeminized man. Adonis refers to himself as a "green" plum (line 527), "Sour to the taste" (line 528), and an "unripe" fruit (line 524) (155). By appealing erotically to readers across traditional lines of gender and by shifting the codes in which male and female bodies are read by one another within the poem, Iyengar states, "The poem suggests that sexual difference and desire, far from being self-evident bodily truths, are filtered through power and fantasy" (158). The poem takes traditional social signs of gender and presents them as unreliably readable or categorizable at the same time that it conveys such categorical failures generically. Ultimately, even the codes of white, red, and green skin color fail to inscribe masculinity and femininity in reliable ways (158). In contrast, Barnfield's The Affectionate Shepheard (AS) uses the code of skin color as a more reliable manner of sexual difference while at the same time ironically reversing traditional codes of skin color and value. Men are praised for their "honest blackness" while women are critiqued for their "false fairness" (159). So while in a sixteen-stanza encomium to blackness, The Affectionate Shepbeard's Daphnis praises black sage over lilies, black sturgeon over white whale, and black rabbits over white ones (Iyengar, 165), "White is the Ensigne of each common woman" (AS, 2.308). In the process, Barnfield negotiates his creative debt to Virgil while also distinguishing himself from Virgil's pastoral by painting a more explicitly homoerotic pastoral world, one that also questions "the moral and gendered values of whiteness" by using the language of blackness to praise the superiority of male friendship.

In her final section, "Travail Narratives," Iyengar explores ways that ethnic and bodily discourses in travel literature and other genres engage with changing taxonomies of labor "to produce an emergent complex of race." In this section, the relationship between racial mythologies and an emerging ideology, buried in earlier sections, becomes most clear. Her seventh and I think her most compelling chapter, "Artificial Negroes" looks at anxieties around Gypsy populations in terms of their obscured origins (are they actually Egyptians or Spanish nobility, or indigenous Britons, writers asked?), their ability and choice to simulate blackness or darkness (despite a white skin underneath), and their skill in avoiding what was termed as honest work (thereby through entertainment or thievery or nomadic subsistence living, avoiding England's rigid class lines). Often these anxieties and their relationship to one another produce a muddled prose that might be seen in Andrew Boorde's description of "Egiptians" (1542), a piece of anti-rogue literature: "The people of [Egipt] be swarte and doth go disgisyd in theyr apparel contrary to other nacyons they be light fyngerd and use pyking [pilfering] they have little maner [ill manners] and evyl loggyng [poor lodging] & yet they be pleasant daunsers" (quoted in Iyengar, 181).

Iyengar moves from rogue literature to drama, including references to Gypsies in Jonson's Volpone (1606), Dekker's Lanthorn and Candelight (1608), and Middleton and Rowley's The Spanish Gypsy (1623). These dramas convey Gypsies' relationships with the other English citizens in contrasting ways. While Jonson considers (with comic dread) the possibility of miscegenation (and thereby designating the Gypsy as bodily distinct), Dekker suspects the Gypsies to be rogue actors, cozening the citizenry of their goods. Middleton and Dekker, however, consider the possibility that Gypsies' gifts of theatricality and dissemblance might be used for the common good. The chapter ends with readings of Jonson's Masque of Gypsies and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. As Egyptian and "gypsy," Cleopatra acts as a kind of expert critic for theatrical display and dissemblance, ultimately asking audiences to consider the labor of theater, Iyengar suggests.

"Suntanned Slaves," Iyengar's eight chapter, contrasts associations with black skin and wealth in city pageants and entertainments, such as Middleton's civic pageant for grocers, The Triumphs of Truth, and Anthony Munday's Chrysanaleia, with ethnographies of dark-skinned Africans produced by slave traders such as John Hawkins. The pageants and city entertainment most often associate black cultures and bodies with wealth and display. These pageants often connect the conversion of black kings and queens from sun worship to Christianity with the availability of goods. These provide important connections between riches and slavery that will be put to use more explicitly later on. Ethnographies produced out of England's first slaving expositions produce other important ideas that are significant for England's emerging mythography of color: the animality of black people, and links to apes, as in John Bulwer's Anthropometamorphosis, but also the links between black bodies and resistance to work, as we see in John Hawkins's and John Sparke's slaving narratives. But not all of the ethnographies produced during this early period of English slaving dehumanize black people, says Iyengar. In Richard Jobson's The Golden Trade (1620), Jobson sees humanity in the captive African men and women that he encounters. The text presents a kind of hierarchy of tribes and nations, discussing the Portuguese and several African tribes, including the Fulani and Mandinka. And while he ranks these tribes in hierarchies such as willingness to work, docility, and beauty, the hierarchies don't correspond predictably to skin color. In one chapter, for example, Jobson praises the Fulani's beauty, modesty and cleanliness, while complaining about Irish Women (Iyengar, 215). He befriends a seventeen-year-old African guide, Samgully, and allows him some subjectivity and intelligence in the narrative. Iyengar concludes that we cannot take Jonson's compassionate idealism as axiomatic of the period, given the influence of other attitudes, reflected in Hawkins and Sparkes, in world events. But she does ask us to consider Jobson's text as one which "both support(s) and challenge(s)" mythographies of color that we have today (219).

Her final chapter, on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle's interest in human variation and speciesism, brings us to the period of a discourse of scientific racialization. Iyengar considers Cavendish's engagement in discourses of species, theories of whether blacks and whites were from the same originator, and Newtonian science of color in her Observations on Experimental Philosophy (Observations)(1666) and The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World. Iyengar details the ways that Caw endish's engagement with these discourses were ways for her to perform her authority and power, as exiled Royalist and as a woman. Her strategies and also theories of race differ according to genre. In her scientific writings, like her Observations, Cavendish affirms the inferiority of women to men and of black men to white by confirming a unified white species and by deferring to the authority of the scientific writers in which she engages. But fiction--here, romance--gives Cavendish the same possibility of imagining a new world of multicolored subjects where rank outweighs gender, race, and religion: "Only in and through romantic invention can women, and human beings of different colors and shapes, become complete and autonomous subjects. In Restoration England, ... only fiction can offer multiple mythologies of femininity and color" (240).

By suspending an explicit engagement of economic and political forces in the structuring of mythologies of race until her final section, "Travail Narratives," the significance of Iyengar's aesthetic observations occasionally lose their critical bite. For example, in her second chapter, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bride," the chapter's aesthetic reading of blackness both opens up and shuts down interpretation. "Blackness" is ultimately severed from attitudes about black bodies or populations to become a sign for the "new" lyric to convey and withstand complexity and open interpretation, so that Edward Herbert's "Black Beauty" "identifies blackness with poetry and argues that blackness becomes poetic not because it can be washed white but because it can generate multiple interpretations" (74). Iyengar does not mention the slave trading activities of John Hawkins (the first one being in 1562) until her eighth chapter, though many of the texts covered in previous chapters were written after 1562. In the effort to avoid a reading of mythologies of color that is reductive, she marginalizes the economic forces still central to her thesis. Her argument for complexity and contradiction on a textual level is very important, yet their separation from the flows of power seems artificial--particularly in her forth and fifth chapters that engage with white identity. I find useful Jyotsna Singh's suggestion that "one way to study whether early modern discourses converge with or diverge from current racialist ideas and practices is via a broad power/knowledge nexus: this historical/literary analysis would approach any social formation as a multiplicity--and to explore each discourse/practice separately, unpacking its layers, decoding its meanings, tracing its development wherever its meandering path may lead" (75).

At the same time, by removing skin color immediately from race, Iyengar opens up all kinds of possibilities for thinking about skin and reading, some temporary, some permanent, most connected to a moral state. Iyengar unearths an impressively rich set of texts to think about the links between text and body, aesthetics, and identity. Iyengar's work breaks the canon of sorts that threatens to always limit the ways that we think about the pervasiveness of race, not just as a marginal mode of inquiry, but constitutive to English identity. This makes Shades of Difference a very important tool for advanced as well as new scholars, one that will spawn new inquiries.

Works Cited

Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Little, Arthur. Shakespeare Jungle Fever. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Singh, Jyotsna. "Racial Dissonance/Canonical Texts: Teaching Early Modern Literary Texts in the Late Twentieth Century." Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 70-82.

Reviewer: Francesca T. Royster