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Shirley Moody‐Turner
One of the most ubiquitous concepts in the study of African American literature and culture, “double consciousness,” has become shorthand for referring to a complex set of meanings and associations related to how people of African descent, and particularly African Americans, variously experience their position within but also apart from mainstream, dominant Western and/or white American society. The concept of double consciousness is most frequently associated with W.E.B. Du Bois, who provided the most overt and direct articulation of double consciousness as related to the ideological and material practices of race, first in his 1897 article “Strivings of the Negro People,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, and then in an extended meditation on the formation of racial consciousness and the material consequences of race in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As scholars have noted, the concept of double consciousness was not new when Du Bois made his pronouncement in 1897; rather, he intervened in an existing discourse, adopting and adapting the concept of double consciousness to offer a trenchant critique of American racial politics. Like Du Bois, African American writers including Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson variously took up the concept of double consciousness as a way to register African Americans’ complex subjectivities within the existing social, political, and cultural discourses. They joined prominent turn‐of‐the‐century psychologists such as William James and Alfred Binet in theorizing aspects of self, identity, and consciousness that could not be accounted for adequately in conventional Western sciences. For African American authors, in particular, the black vernacular figured prominently in constructing notions of an African American double consciousness that could both critique the dominant ways of seeing, interpreting, and representing reality, while also giving expression to African Americans’ unique position within, yet apart from, American society.
Double Consciousness at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
In “The Hidden Self,” published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1890, William James reviewed a range of literature devoted to investigating phenomena related to the existence of a “split” or “multiple” consciousness. The essay sets out first to establish the limits of conventional scientific epistemologies, arguing that what becomes accepted knowledge quickly establishes the boundaries of legitimate inquiry and discredits or disregards phenomena that fall outside of the approved structures or classifications. Instead, James argues for attention to the “unclassified residuum,” or those traces, exceptions, and unexplained phenomena that exist outside of accepted scientific knowledge and cannot be easily fitted into the accepted systems of classification (James 1890: 361). In particular, the literature James reviews examines the non‐material aspects of existence and identity: repressed memories, sensations, and perceptions. Focusing on examples from the case studies of the French psychologist Alfred Binet, James relates how traumatic experiences can result in a split in consciousness and how individuals can be variously aware of the existence of these multiple consciousness or divergent selves.
While neither James nor Binet takes up the question of race directly, their assertion that there is an irrational, non‐material world that “transcends” accepted scientific thought and that traumatic experiences can result in the experience of divergent or fragmented selves provided a congenial framework through which African American writers like Du Bois could theorize the experience of race. Ever critical of the ways in which “scientific” thought had been used to collude with racist, racializing schema, Du Bois, Hopkins, and others may have found resonant James’s privileging of spiritual, non‐material epistemologies over the rational logics of “modern” scientific thought. In their writings, Du Bois, Hopkins, Cooper, Chesnutt, and Dunbar all validate alternative forms of knowing (i.e. vernacular or folk traditions) that arise from discredited knowledge, experiences, and peoples – what Toni Morrison refers to in a later context as “the discredited knowledge” of a discredited people (Morrison 1984: 342). Thus, for each of these writers, part of the source and a potential reconciliation of double consciousness resides in the vernacular traditions that carry alterative knowledge and ways of knowing. James also brought attention to the socio‐psychological effects of trauma in ways that resonate with Du Bois’s description of double consciousness, in part as a socio‐psychological experience of difference and alienation that fragments one’s social identities and thwarts the development of a unified sense of self. Finally, James’s notion of the “hidden self” that results as a consequence of repressed memories proves a useful metaphor for evoking the suppressed histories of slavery, the middle passage, racial mixing and passing, and (sexual) violence that are hidden within the modern American dream of modernity and democracy. For African American writers, double consciousness was not just about finding a space for spiritual, mystical, and/or psychic phenomena that had been marginalized in the scientific, rational world. It was also very much about representing the experience of existing in two worlds, one white and one black, and about navigating the material and spiritual worlds as refracted through the intersecting social categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
As much as James and his contemporaries provide a context for locating Du Boisian theorizations of double consciousness, Du Bois’s formulations must also be understood in relation to the social, political, and cultural context of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, when Du Bois published “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in 1897, race relations had been steadily deteriorating over the preceding two decades. Civil and political advancements marked by the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments had been largely unrealized. With the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, the hopes of federal support to enforce the amendments vanished, and African American civil and political rights were left fundamentally unprotected. In the literary and cultural spheres, works were produced to buttress regressive political agendas and to legitimate the rise in violent retribution intended to “police” African Americans and reinforce white supremacist power structures. Continuing a tradition of glorifying the antebellum South as a period of prosperity, white racial purity, and happy, contented slaves, works such as Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia, or Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887) represented the South as an idyllic land of white chivalry and benign paternalism and sowed the seeds of what would become a much darker iteration of this tradition, known as “lost cause” literature. Exemplified in novels such as Page’s Red Rock (1898) and especially Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden – 1865–1900 (1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), lost cause literature not only lamented the loss of white southern prosperity and (imagined) racial purity, but also depicted blacks as immoral and animalistic, touting white mob violence and lynching as necessary responses to the imminent threat blacks allegedly posed to white women specifically and racial purity more generally. While African Americans wrote, organized, and agitated to stem the rising tide of racial intolerance and violence, the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 effectively legalized racial segregation. In the decision, the justices determined that there could be two Americas, that blacks and whites did not need interracial interaction at the “social” level – which extended to public conveyances, education, and accommodations – and that black people, even if they appeared phenotypically white, were not due the consideration, or “reputation,” that accompanied whiteness. For many African Americans, that decision signaled what Rayford Logan would later label as the “nadir” of American racial relations. It also codified how marginalized African Americans were within the American body politic.
In the Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois deploys a multifaceted concept of double consciousness to illustrate the complex individual, collective, and historical‐social location of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout the text, Du Bois scales the notion of “double consciousness” from the individual psyche – the preoccupation of James and his peers – to a communal experience, and then to a sociohistorical formation with the mechanisms of race operating as the central catalysts for the construction of the two worlds, two realms, and two realities that confront African Americans at both the individual and social levels. He locates an alternative African American consciousness in black vernacular and folk practices and elevates spirituality over the materialistic, commercial world of the West.
Of Du Boisian Double Consciousness
In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois introduces the concept of double consciousness. He begins in the first person, using his own experience to theorize the spiritual and psychological impacts of race on the individual. In a very succinct example, Du Bois relates the socio‐psychological process through which his own double consciousness emerged. While still in the “early days of rollicking boyhood” in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a female classmate refused his visiting card, “refused it peremptorily, with a glance” (Du Bois 2007: 7). Du Bois explains how this experience gave rise to a sudden awareness, or the beginnings of his ontological experience of double consciousness: “it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness, that I was different from the other […] shut out from their world by a vast veil” (Du Bois 2007: 7–8). This experience of alienation, difference, and contempt set in motion for Du Bois a series of individual attempts to come to terms with the material and psychological consequences of his newfound awareness. He devotes his efforts to proving he is as good as, or better than, any of his “mates,” both physically and intellectually, and sets about claiming the “dazzling opportunities” and “prizes” held tantalizingly aloft from him on the other side of the veil (Du Bois 2007: 8).1
Du Bois then theorizes from his own overdetermined attempts to grapple with the prejudice he encounters to situate similarly the attempts of “other black boys.” He locates his own existential crisis, and those of other black boys, as indicative of the “negro’s” place as “an outcast and a stranger in mine own house.” In this way, the text moves first from the individual effort to the communal response. It is, Du Bois argues, “this American world […] [that] yields [the African American] no true self‐consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” This produces in African Americans the famed “double consciousness,” the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Du Bois 2007: 8). As the world “glances,” “sees,” and “looks on” the African American with eyes that only register the superficial dimensions between contempt and pity, Souls constantly reminds readers of the “buried,” “hidden,” “repressed” histories that testify not only to a more complex black subjectivity, but also to the repressed histories of enslavement and the black experience that haunt what Simon Critchley refers to as the “dream of modernity” (Critchley 1994: 1008).
Moving from the personal and the communal into sociohistorical terms, Du Bois argues that the “history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self‐conscious manhood,” and he places this battle within the context of the struggles for progress over the last four decades of the nineteenth century (Du Bois 2007: 9). This shift allows him to evaluate approaches taken to achieve progress: freedom struggles, political struggles, educational and cultural efforts, and economic redress. Ultimately, however, Du Bois posits race prejudice as the fundamental barrier to true progress and the source of double consciousness at the individual level as well as the impetus for the social bifurcation that creates and rationalizes two systems of economics, justice, and education.
In “Of the Coming of John,” the penultimate chapter of Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois refocuses on the individual level to show the material consequences of a double consciousness occasioned by race. In the story he narrates there are two Johns. The white John, complacent in his privilege, shirks his responsibility to accept a leadership role in his community even as he assumes he will eventually be given some privileged position. The black John, on the other hand, struggles mightily to gain an education, improve his standing in the community, and return home to help advance the other members of the community. For his efforts, he is alienated by his education from the black community and singled out by the white community for not knowing his place. His negotiation of the pressures of existing in and across these two worlds results in more than psychological trauma, but will, the text suggests, end in his death at the hands of a lynch mob. As in Souls, James Weldon Johnson in The Autobiography of an Ex‐Colored Man (1912) adopts the concept of double consciousness to explore the imaginative possibilities and limitations of black subjectivities rendered in the context of US racial constructs. As Paul Gilroy (1993) notes, the protagonist of Johnson’s novel is so overdetermined by his own consciousness about the way the white world views him that he attempts a literal doubling, attempting to be both black and white – or, as Gilroy states, a black man who could “cross the colour line and pass for a white man whenever he wished” (131). When a lynching prompts his realizations about the barbarity of race relations in the United States, however, the ex‐colored man flees the country for Europe, where he tries to join European classical music with a black vernacular ethos. Thus, in Du Bois’s and Johnson’s versions of double consciousness, psychological traumas are compounded by social terror, and race is always an instigating factor.
In other chapters in Souls – “Of Booker T. Washington,” “Of the Meaning of Progress,” and “On the Wings of Atalanta” – Du Bois underscores how notions of progress and modernity are undermined by operations of race, and he argues that economic progress cannot be achieved when racial discrimination and a lack of political power forestall the protection of economic gains. As Gilroy asserts, the alternative history embodied in folk/vernacular culture stands as a critique of modernity. The musical bars drawn from African American spirituals, or what Du Bois calls “sorrow songs,” that open each chapter of Souls, for instance, convey the horrors of slavery and stand as an indictment of the supposed progress and modernity ushered in by racial capitalism. It is in black vernacular culture, Gilroy observes, that we get the songs, stories, repressed histories, and memories that constitute a counterculture of modernity.
Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk thus makes several contributions to turn‐of‐the‐ century discourses of double consciousness. As scholars have asserted, on one level Souls is about the socio‐psychological experience of being black in America. He names what Bernard Bell refers to as the “socialized ambivalence” that characterizes the conflicted relationship of African Americans within, but also apart from, dominant white cultural, social, and political institutions (Bell 2004: 68). Du Bois refers to this as African Americans’ pursuit of “double aims,” or “this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals […] [that] has sent them often wooing false gods and seeking false salvation and at times has seemed even about to make them ashamed of themselves” (Du Bois 2007: 10). In addition to naming the socio‐psychological impact of race on black Americans, Du Boisian double consciousness also carries with it an implicit critique of notions of progress and modernity, positing the vernacular aspects of black culture as sites of memory and suppressed history. While the experience of race in America, Du Bois argues, yields the African American “no true self‐consciousness,” the resulting double consciousness is generative of a valuable “second sight” or double vision that allows African Americans to critique the professed ideas and dominant practices of US society through access to alternative histories, experiences, and observations. In terms of literary and cultural production, Henry Louis Gates, in The Signifying Money: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1989, see Further Reading), argues that this tension might best be characterized by the existence of a signifying relationship through which writers of African descent enter into literary and cultural engagements with the racialized norms and conventions embedded in Western literary and philosophical traditions.
For writers from Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar to Toni Morrison and Ta‐Nehisi Coates, double consciousness has served as a central trope for expressing the paradox of operating within, yet apart from, dominant, white Western culture. Dunbar, for instance, utilizes the literary trope of masking to explore how racial perceptions operate across the veil and give rise to the powerful “second sight” blacks’ double consciousness produces. Indeed, his 1895 poem “We Wear the Mask” provides the quintessential literary representation of the veil:
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, –
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over‐wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
(Dunbar 1922: 71)
In this poem Dunbar suggests that the white world views African Americans only through the minstrel caricatures of pity or humor. Dunbar’s narrator, for instance, declares that the world sees only the “mask that grins and lies” and thus interprets black cultural productions at only the most superficial level through smiles and sighs. The poem’s narrator, however, attempts to take the reader behind the veil, showing that underneath the “smile” are “cries” that arise from “tortured souls.” In form, too, Dunbar adopts and adapts, or “signifies on,” the rondeau, a 15‐line poem in iambic tetrameter, structured around the repetition of a refrain, and typically set to music. Dunbar utilizes the traditional rhythmic musical form of the rondeau to point out, and interrupt, the conflation of form and content. Underneath the rhythmic cadence of the rondeau lie more sinister themes of objectification and suffering, just as beneath the facile mask of the black minstrel performer lies a more complex and nuanced black subjectivity.
As in Dunbar’s verse, double consciousness comes to figure prominently in much of the fiction of Charles Chesnutt. He and Dunbar were the most popular African American writers at the turn of the century, though some audiences did not know of Chesnutt’s racial identity until the publication of his second collection of stories, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899). In the seven stories in Chesnutt’s first collection, The Conjure Woman (1899), three of which had originally been published in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, a former slave, Uncle Julius, weaves dialect tales of the “ole plantation” before the war into the dominant frame narrative, which is told in a white northern character’s measured and pedantic prose. Throughout the stories, Chesnutt cues the readers that Uncle Julius knows more about the white characters, and about what the white characters think they know about him, than the white characters can imagine. While the white narrator, John, reads Julius’s knowledge of the southern locale through the lens of simplistic and primitive attachment, for instance, Julius slowly reveals in each successive story that his knowledge of the land is based on what Sarah Ingles identifies as a deep knowledge of “the people and traumatic history that inhabit” the land (Ingles 2011: 149).
While showing how double consciousness can be transformed into a powerful double vision or second sight, The Conjure Woman also champions the vernacular, non‐material and spiritual world as a counterpoint to the rational, scientistic, market‐based consciousness that John represents. John’s interest in and knowledge of southern lands is dictated by his economic interests and the stereotypical perceptions he has adopted to justify those interests. Through the stories, Julius, understanding both John and the lens through which he views Julius and the southern lands John now owns, uses that knowledge to educate John about the history of the plantation, the inhumanities of slavery, the continued effects of slavery into the present, and the need for reparations. John, relying upon scientistic, rational epistemologies, however, repeatedly misses the moral of Julius’s stories. John’s wife, Annie, on the other hand, who is suffering from general malaise, likely due to the lifeless, devitalizing world John represents, finds in Julius’s stories a point of connection and community. She is awakened to the horrors of plantation life and the debt that is owed to the black people who have worked, suffered, and died on the land she and her husband have just purchased. This sense of communion and accountability creates a human connection between her and Julius that restores her to health. In The Conjure Woman, and in Chesnutt’s fiction more broadly, double consciousness is transformed into a valuable form of double vision that enables his black characters to see best how to inform and influence their white interlocutors.
In terms of literary genre, double consciousness can also be read as a vehicle through which Chesnutt exposed the racial assumptions and literary conventions of the emerging dominant mode of late nineteenth‐century literary representation: literary realism. Like Dunbar, Chesnutt was concerned about the literary and cultural forms that purported to represent “authentic” African American life during the period. While Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” unsettles the minstrel caricatures of blacks, Chesnutt’s fiction often addressed the images of black constructed in “realist” forms of literary and cultural representation. In The Conjure Woman, for instance, Chesnutt reveals the limits of John’s “realist” representations of Julius, showing how the supposedly objective ethnographic lens John employs to represent and analyze Julius is colored by the conventions of plantation romance and minstrel caricature. Chesnutt’s contemporary Anna Julia Cooper, too, pointed out the ways in which white writers’ prejudices colored their supposedly realist portrayals of black characters. Lamenting that white writers had become the arbiters of what was considered authentic about black life, Cooper asserted that William Dean Howells, who served as editor of Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881 and was referred to as the “dean” of American letters, could not “discern diversities of individuality, and had no right or authority to hawk ‘the only true and authentic’ pictures of a race of human beings” (Cooper 1988: 206). Instead, she called for “a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro’s stand point” (225). Drawing on Julius’s double consciousness, this is, in part, the work Chesnutt performs in The Conjure Woman – giving us a view of both Julius and black life in the South, as well as offering a perspective on the limits and limitations of the white northerners, as seen from Julius’s point of view. In this way, Julius’s valuable second sight calls into question what might be considered “realist” representations, and posits the value of alternative forms of representation – from storytelling to “historical romance” – in relating the “truth” of black life in America.
However, when Chesnutt discarded the frame of plantation fiction that he had employed in The Conjure Woman, addressing more directly the grim state of race relations in the postbellum South in The Marrow of Tradition (1901), his novel about the white supremacist insurrection in Wilmington, North Carolina, his fiction was judged, by none other than William Dean Howells, as too bitter. Thus, as Gene Jarrett argues, one can see black writers negotiating with what Jarrett terms a “minstrel realism” that drew on the conventions of minstrel and plantation traditions to determine what constituted “authentic” portrayals of black life (Jarrett 2007: 32–33). In this way, black writers like Chesnutt and Dunbar enacted a kind of literary double consciousness, aware of the conventions that determined racial representation and deft at working within and against those very conventions.
Voicing Black Women’s Double Consciousness
Eleven years before the publication of Souls, Anna Julia Cooper in her collection of essays, A Voice from the South, relates an incident while traveling by train in which she encounters a sign above each of the two bathrooms at a railway station – one reads “For Ladies” and the other “For Colored People.” She wonders, “under which head I come” (Cooper 1988: 96). While Du Bois’s moment of existential crisis comes when he is denied his place in the patriarchal structure because of his race, Cooper highlights her invisibility, or non‐personhood, in a system which constructs “Ladies” as synonymous with whiteness and “Colored People” as inherently masculinized. Cooper, however, refuses this either/or ontology, never telling us, as Martha Cutter notes, “which door she enters” (Cutter 1999: 77). Instead, she uses this story to launch a gendered critique of racialized patriarchal power from her unique position as black woman. Just as Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness turned in part on the denial of black male subjectivity, for Cooper the denial of black female subjectivity at the turn of the twentieth century signaled the double or even triple consciousness experienced by black women. Indeed, Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness has been adapted to account for an ever‐expanding range of social/identity formations distinct from that of white, heterosexual, male. Regarding the additional layers of gendered and sexualized oppression black women have to negotiate, Calvin Hernton has argued that “black women have contended with the mountain of racism in America. But being at once black, American, and female, they have also been victimized by the mountain of sexism, not only from the white world but from the men of the black world as well […] they are, therefore, bearers of a triple consciousness” (1985, 8). In other words, black women not only have to navigate the racial oppression and objectification of the dominant society, but also have to contend with the gendered and sexual oppression of a dominant patriarchy, both black and white.
In terms that anticipate Du Bois’s description of a racial system that yields black men “no true self‐consciousness” (Du Bois 2007: 8), Cooper asserts that the black woman, silenced and objectified within the racist, patriarchal system, is assumed to have “no‐God‐given destiny, no soul with unquenchable longings and inexhaustible possibilities – no absolute and inherent value, no duty to self, transcending all pleasure‐giving that may be demanded of a mere toy” (Cooper 1988: 64). Like the “black boys” Du Bois references in Souls, in Cooper’s scenario, the black woman or girl is presented as others see her, devoid of inherent value, personhood, or subjectivity. Cooper is especially critical of silencing that would turn black women into objects and “play things” to be talked about and gazed upon, and of a structure in which they would not be seen as “speaking subjects” (Cutter 1999: 68). Cooper insists, however, that black women’s voices should not merely replicate the domineering or oppressive aspects she associates with supremacist, patriarchal discourse. Black women’s voices, she argues, must provide a counterbalance to masculinist discourses; and Cooper’s deployment of the musical metaphor to organize A Voice from the South is not incidental. She posits voice, and specifically the musical voice, as a form of alternative discourse to assert and articulate a black female subjectivity, and as a vehicle through which to introduce alternative voices to the conversation. As Cutter observes, Cooper evokes a musical metaphor to represent “the presence of an African American, feminine, voice that overrides patriarchal and racist discourses of oppression” (Cutter 1999: 80), and she locates within that musical, feminine voice, the articulation of the “long dull pain” and silent suffering of the “voiceless Black Woman of America” (Cooper 1988: ii). Just as vernacular traditions and song offered an important site of counter‐memory in Souls, for Cooper, music and song, not objectifying and abstract discourse, are the true demonstration of individual subjectivity and freedom.
Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood enters the discourse of double consciousness informed by both James’s and Du Bois’s theorizations of the concept. Hopkins’s conceptualization, however, centers the intersectional dynamics of race and gender; and her novel, like Du Bois’s Souls, roots double consciousness in the context of a transhistorical, diasporic black consciousness. In its attention to the intersectional politics of gender and race, however, Of One Blood can also be read as a literary rendering of the philosophical imperatives Cooper outlined in regard to voice, and specifically the singing voice, as an alternative form of intervention in an overly masculinized discourse. In this way, Of One Blood makes a radical gendered intervention in turn‐of‐the‐century discourses of double consciousness.
Hopkins’s novel, serially published in Colored American Magazine during 1902–1903, opens with what some critics identify as a “Duboisian character” (Brooks 2006: 325), a young medical student of ambiguous racial background named Reuel Briggs. Although he expects to make a great contribution to the world’s knowledge, Reuel is dogged by the heavy and impenetrable veil that has settled down between him and those in the world around him. When we first encounter him, he is reading the “The Unclassified Residuum,” a thinly veiled reference to William James’s “The Hidden Self.” While James’s texts resonate with Reuel’s own attempts to conceal his mixed‐race identity, as well as with his deep sense that there are layers of consciousness, some of which remain on the surface and some of which are suppressed, Reuel remains restless and forlorn. Instead of finding solace in his studies, he is goaded by the sense that there is a deeper knowledge and understanding that elude him. Through Reuel, Hopkins foregrounds the racial dynamics endemic in the notion of double consciousness. On one level, double consciousness in Hopkins’s text is about recognizing the existence of multiple selves as James had theorized. It is also about validating the coexistence of the spiritual, non‐material world alongside material realities. As with Du Bois, however, Hopkins’s treatment of double consciousness takes as its center the ways in which the concept is inflected through the experience of race. For instance, Reuel’s experience of double consciousness is very much informed by his need to conceal his racial identity as well as by his awareness of the great divide between himself and those in the white community where he lives and works. The text also reveals the degree to which the allusion to James’s subtitle “The Hidden Self” serves as a metaphor for the US body politic more generally, with its amalgamated racial origins, both in terms of genealogy and in relation to the social, economic, political, and cultural contributions of African Americans, which have been continually obscured and erased. In other words, the complex, intertwined racial history exists as the “hidden” self to America’s dream of homogeneous whiteness. As with Du Bois, Johnson, Dunbar, Chesnutt, and Cooper, Hopkins too posits black vernacular traditions as part of African Americans’ “valuable second sight” that not only can reconcile the “accursed double consciousness,” but that also serves as an alternative form of memory and knowing from which to challenge dominant cultural narratives. Throughout the text it is powerfully rendered spirituals, concealed knowledge revealed through visions and trances, and mystical familial connections that serve as both alternative sites of knowledge and alternative ways of knowing.
While the “new psychology” certainly validated forms of spiritualism dismissed in the “orthodox” sciences of the late nineteenth century, in Hopkins’s novel understanding of the new psychology does not ultimately endow her male protagonist with the “valuable second sight” needed to reconcile his own double consciousness, nor does it provide him with the knowledge he needs to truly “see” or understand the phenomena he witnesses. Time and again, Hopkins uses the word “gaze,” or some form thereof (55 times in the 198‐page novel), to signify a separation between looking and comprehension. Characters gaze out into the darkness, at the pages of a book, or at a sign while their inner thoughts linger elsewhere. The gaze stays locked in the visual field, unable to give access to the deeper emotions or cultural memories on which a more developed consciousness depends. In a key scene, for instance, where Reuel learns the false motives of one of his companions, it is not his recourse to scientific epistemology that yields him the vital information he needs, but rather an apparition, in the form of his grandmother Mira (also the Spanish command “look”), that comes to him insisting that he “look” at the evidence in front of him: “Twice did the visionary scene, passing behind the seer, recross his entranced eyes; and twice did the shadowy finger of the shining apparition in the tent door point, letter by letter, to the pictured page of the billet, which Jim was at that very moment perusing with his natural, and Reuel Briggs with his spiritual eyes” (Hopkins 2004: 89). It is in this moment that Reuel moves from the cursed double consciousness characterized by the pervasive, but ineffectual masculinist gaze to claiming the valuable second sight bestowed upon him through his connection with his familial and cultural past. In this way, female characters and their alternative forms of knowing serve as catalysts for the reconciliation of his double consciousness, with the vision induced by Mira’s apparition serving to connect him to suppressed personal, familial, and cultural knowledge.
Reuel’s sister, Dianthe, serves as another powerful agent of change and cultural memory. Through her exquisite voice and song she not only claims and demonstrates her own subjectivity, she also becomes a conduit for the expression of other muted voices as well. Indeed, her performance of the African American spiritual “Go Down, Moses” provides one of the most compelling literary renderings of double consciousness in turn‐of‐the‐century African American literature. When Dianthe is moved to sing the spiritual in her white host’s parlor, her impromptu audience hears the two voices Dianthe articulates. Her individual voice is joined with a communal voice that carries the repressed cultural memory of slavery, of resistance to oppression, and of the longing for freedom:
Scarcely was the verse begun when every person in the room started suddenly and listened with eager interest. […]
“Great Heaven! Whispered Mr. Vance to his daughter, “do you not hear another voice beside Mrs. Briggs’?”
It was true, indeed. A weird contralto, veiled as it were, rising and falling upon every wave of the great soprano, and reaching the ear as from some strange distance. The singer sang on, her voice dropping sweet and low, the echo following it, and at the closing word, she fell back in a dead faint.
(Hopkins 2004: 67)
Joining her individual voice with a historical voice, Dianthe sings across multiple registers of self, other, and history; the deep vernacular voice that characterizes the sorrow song joins with her formally trained operatic soprano voice to reconcile the “cursed double consciousness.” But not only is this the marriage of the learned and vernacular that Andrew Schreiber (2006) posits as the true reconciliation of double consciousness; it is also a moment when the reader/audience is forced to see the black woman as a “complex, multidimensional subject” (Brooks 2006: 319). In this way, Hopkins and Cooper make an indispensable contribution to turn‐of‐the‐century discourses of double consciousness, giving voice to the unique ways double consciousness was inflected through the intersectional politics of race and gender, and to the unique role that black women played in the reconciliation of double consciousness.
Double consciousness at the turn of the century was a complex concept utilized to explicate and explore aspects of individual and social identity and being that exceeded accepted scientific categorizations. Du Bois saw in the concept a framework congenial to characterizing the feeling of twoness that resulted from being black in America, from seeing one’s self as others see him, and from being designated and studied as a problem and a pariah. In the face of the turn‐of‐the‐century repression of black social, civic, and political life, double consciousness was taken up by numerous African American writers. This chapter treats some of the most well‐known writers of the period, but other turn‐of‐the‐century black writers, such as Sutton Griggs, Frances Harper, and many others, evoked the concept of double consciousness – either directly or implicitly – to give literary expression to the individual realities of living within these imperiled conditions, as well as to name the social structures on which segregation and difference were being constructed and enforced. In double consciousness, writers also articulated a strategy for survival and resistance. By locating black vernacular traditions as the roots of a generative double consciousness or second sight, these writers offered a counterpoint to a cold, calculating modernity and contributed to an ongoing counter‐narrative that documented the histories of slavery and oppression while illustrating a complex black subjectivity. Locating a critique of gender at the center of patriarchal formations of racial/double consciousness, postbellum black women writers such as Cooper and Hopkins imagined black women’s voices, in particular, as vital sites of subjectivity through which a more holistic reconciliation of the “cursed double consciousness” could take shape.
Acknowledgment
A special thank you to Laura Vrana for her research assistance, and especially for her contributions in preparing the entries for Further Reading.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 15 (GENDER AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ANTEBELLUM SLAVE NARRATIVES).
Note