On the Question of Racial Aesthetics with Reference to D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love

Yoruba carved wooden figure

I.

As everyone knows, many European artists at the beginning of the twentieth-century were inspired by the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture and, without understanding anything of the original symbolism and function of the works, they cheerfully appropriated numerous elements into their own projects in an attempt to move beyond the naturalism that had defined (and limited) Western art since the Renaissance.

Soon, anyone and everyone who wanted to be thought of as avant-garde, began to purchase African figures and masks and to rave about the aesthetic and spiritual value to be found in primitivism. So, it's not surprising that when Birkin and Gerald stay with Julius Halliday and his bohemian friends at a flat in Soho there were "several negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa" [74] on display.

Gerald finds the pieces strange and disturbing; particularly the figure of a woman sitting naked in a contorted posture (possibly giving birth), which he describes as obscene. The next morning, still troubled by the work, he asks his friend Rupert for his views on it:

"Birkin, white and strangely present, went over to the carved figure of the negro woman in labour. Her nude, protuberant body crouched in a strange, clutching posture, her hands gripping the ends of the band, above her breast.

      'It is art,' said Birkin." [78]
     
Gerald re-examines the figure. But somehow - and for some reason - it made his heart contract:

"He saw vividly, with his spirit, the grey, forward-stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress, It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaningless by the weight of sensation beneath. [...]

      'Why is it art?' Gerald asked, shocked, resentful. 

      'It conveys a complete truth,' said Birkin. 'It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.'

      'But you can't call it high art,' said Gerald. 

      'High! There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development [...] behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a definite sort.'

      'What culture?' Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer African thing. 

      'Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.

      But Gerald resented it. He wanted to keep certain illusions, certain ideas like clothing. 

      'You like the wrong things, Rupert,' he said, 'things against yourself.'" 

      'Oh, I know, this isn't everything,'" Birkin replied, moving away. [79]

Although he doesn't let on here, Birkin is perhaps even more perturbed by the female figure than Gerald. Thus it is that, twelve chapters later in the novel, when suddenly recalling the African fetishes he had encountered at Halliday's flat:

"There came back to him one, a statuette about two feet high, a tall, slim, elegant figure from West Africa, in dark wood, glossy and suave. It was a woman, with hair dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered her vividly: she was one of his soul's intimates. Her body was long and elegant, her face was crushed tiny like a beetle's, she had rows of round heavy collars, like a column of quoits, on her neck. He remembered her: her astonishing cultured elegance, her diminished beetle face, the astounding long elegant body, on short, ugly legs, with such protuberant buttocks, so weighty and unexpected below her slim long loins. She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her." [253]

This passage - along with the earlier exchange between Birkin and Gerald - can only be understood in relation to the question of racial (and racialised) aesthetics ...

II.

We can, I suppose, take it as a given that there is a dynamic between race and aesthetics and that one of the privileges of having a white skin is that you get to determine what is (and is not) objectively beautiful and that on the basis of this determination white people can also justify the denigration of black art and culture - and, indeed, black people - as ugly and inherently inferior.

But the paradoxical thing, of course, is that white people also find blackness threatening and sexually provocative (something keenly exploited by pornographers). They might not wish to accept people of colour as their social, political, and cultural equals, but they are happy to indulge in exoticism and attribute extraordinary qualities to other races - often by virtue of their physical features - which makes them alluring.    

I think we can find aspects of all these things - the normative component of (white) aesthetics and the attempt to imbue beauty with racial meaning, the overt racism and often unconscious bias of white people unaware of their own privilege, the sexual stereotyping and objectification of black bodies, etc. - in the passages quoted above from Women in Love.

Gerald is shocked to hear Birkin describe the African statuette as a work of art and point out that it has thousands of years of culture behind it. He cannot accept this: for him, art - certainly high art - and culture (which he associates with clothing and illusion) belongs exclusively to the white world. Gerald hates the pure African thing and seems to regard Birkin as something of a race traitor for liking the wrong things - things that are non-white and non-Western. 

 
Almost, one is tempted to describe Gerald as a negrophobe; i.e., someone gripped by a fear and/or hatred for black people and black culture - a condition that if not rooted in the ideology of white aesthetics, is certainly reinforced by it. For Gerald, whiteness and blackness transcend mere skin tones or even aesthetic qualites; they have moral and metaphysical significance.* 

But then the same is also true of Birkin. Indeed, Birkin has an entire philosophy worked out in terms of race and two contrasting forms of abstraction (which seems to be his word for a fatal form of racial consummation):

"The white races, having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snow-abstract annihilation. Whereas the West Africans, controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara, had been fulfilled in sun-destruction, the putresecent mystery of sun-rays." [254]

This is the kind of thing one only finds in Lawrence - and Nazi occultism. But Birkin's main interest in the African statuette, however, is more erotic than esoteric; he finds the female figure extremely elegant and utterly sensual and when he remembers her he does so vividly: she was, we are told, one of his soul's intimates. Does that mean Birkin has a black soul? Or does it mean, rather, that he fetishises black female beauty? Probably the latter, I would suggest.

In other words, rather than stigmatise the racial features of African women as deviating from the accepted standard of white beauty, he indulges in a little racial exoticism and pervs on their hair styles, their faces, and their bodies, particularly the protuberant buttocks and slim long loins.

Now, some people might suggest that's better than Gerald's overt negrophobia - but really it's just the other side of the same coin and it's worth noting that whilst Birkin may seceretly lust after black women, he marries snow white Ursula Brangwen and continues to move in all white circles. One suspects that, push comes to shove, he might even share the view expressed by Oliver Mellors; i.e., black women are sensual and orgasmic creatures alright, but, well, he's a white man: and they're a bit like mud.**    

What would be good, would be learning to see members of different races as people in their own right without viewing them only in relation to a white ideal of beauty. Of course, that's never going to happen - particularly in an age increasingly characterised by identity politics. And besides, perhaps it's an innately human thing (and not just a white thing at all) for people to judge others in relation to themselves ...  

See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

See also John M. Kang, 'Deconstructing the Ideology of White Aesthetics', Michigan Journal of Race and Law, Vol. 2, (1997), pp. 283-359, an essay which I found extremely helpful whilst writing this post.

* The term negrophobia was popularised in the mid-twentieth century by the political philosopher Frantz Fanon in works such as Peaux noires masques blancs (1952), trans. into English as Black Skin, White Masks, (1967), and Les Damnés de la Terre, (1961) trans. into English as The Wretched of the Earth (1963). 

** I'm referring here to an infamous exchange between Connie and Mellors, in which the latter reveals just what a misogynistic, homophobic, and racist character he is. See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 204. For a full character analysis of Mellors, click here.

Cut it Out - Reflections on Blue Nudes and Racial Fetishism in the Work of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse: Nu bleu IV (1952)

The Blue Nudes are a series of painted female figure cut-outs stuck to paper and then mounted on canvas, completed by Henri Matisse in 1952. They are - no matter what fanatic Lawrentians may think - very lovely works and have added poignancy when one recalls that they were produced very late in his life when Matisse was not in the best of health, having undergone surgery for abdominal cancer ten years earlier. 

Conventional painting and sculpture having become too physically demanding, Matisse turned in his final decade to a new medium and, with the help of his assistants, began creating artworks that defy genre, being neither paintings nor sculptures as such, but incorporating elements of both these disciplines. 

Initially, the cut-outs were fairly modest in size and ambition, but eventually included large pieces of great complexity and if, at first, Matisse thought of them as subsidiary to his earlier work, by 1946 he had started to appreciate the possibilities inherent to the technique and to realise the new freedom working with scissors rather than brushes allowed him: An artist, he declared, must never be a prisoner of any style, of the past, or of himself ... 

Blue Nude IV - shown above - took the elderly artist two weeks of cutting and arranging (and an entire sketchbook of preliminary studies) before it eventually satisfied him. The slightly awkward and uncomfortable looking pose of the figure was obviously one for which Matisse had a penchant, as it's similar to a number of nudes completed earlier in his career and can be traced back to Le bonheur de vivre (1905-06), one of the great masterpieces of modernism completed in his so-called Fauve period. 

Mention must also be made of Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, painted shortly afterwards: 

This work scandalised the French public when first exhibited in 1907 and continued to provoke controversy six years later at the Armory Show in the United States, where it was burned in effigy - not least because of concerns about the racial origins of the female figure. 

There's an obvious and much discussed primitivism and Orientalism in Matisse's work; African sculpture fascinated and inspired him as much as it did Picasso and other European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Disillusioned with Western culture and searching for new values and new ways of seeing the world, Matisse and his contemporaries attempted to merge the highly stylized treatment of the human figure found in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness and vivid use of colour helped to define early modernism. 

Whilst these artists probably knew very little, if anything, of the history or meaning of the African sculptures they encountered - and probably didn't care all that much - they nevertheless recognized the magical and powerful aspects and adapted these to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

Ultimately, one might suggest that the blueness in the works shown here signifies seductive Otherness and functions as a disguised form of blackness, revealing the fact that Matisse (like many white men) has something of a secret BGF ...    

On the Black Virgin and the Question of Racial Fetishism

Nigra sum sed formosa 

The statues and paintings of Mary created in medieval Europe are all fascinating, but none more so than those in which the Mother of God has dark skin; the so-called Black Virgins (or Black Madonnas), of which there are several hundred located in various churches and shrines, venerated by their devotees and associated with miracles by pilgrims who come to receive a blessing.     

If I'm honest, however, what really interests is not the significance of the figure within Catholic theology, or the pagan roots of her worship, but the sexual allure of black femininity for white heterosexual males. Obviously, this is a controversial topic - perhaps more so now than ever.

In the past, the concern was with miscegenation and only decadent individuals openly flaunted their love for women of colour and were excited by the idea of transgression. Today, mixed race relationships are more commonplace and relatively accepted, but there is now a real (and legitimate) concern with racial fetishism; that is to say, with the manner in which white men view the non-white women whom they subject to their eroticized and imperial gaze.

For women of colour are not merely objectified sexually, but racially stereotyped. Their exotic otherness is not so much exaggerated and distorted as it is invented within the pornographic imagination, before being circulated and sustained within wider popular culture (via art and advertising, for example).

Angela Carter understands how this game works. In her short story, Black Venus, she describes the illicit affair between Baudelaire and his mistress Jeanne Duval (who was of mixed European and African origin), perfectly capturing the essence of the relationship and how, for the poet, this Creole woman symbolizes primitive sensuality and the promise of faraway lands.

Thus, when he's not asking her to take off her clothes and dance naked for Daddy except for the bangles and beads he loves so much - his eyes fixed upon the darkness of her skin - he's whispering like a madman into the ear of his pet:

"Baby, baby, let me take you back where you belong, back to your lovely, lazy island where the jewelled parrot rocks on the enamel tree and you can crunch sugar-cane between your strong, white teeth ... When we get there, among the lilting palm-trees, under the purple flowers, I'll love you to death. We'll go back and live together in a thatched house with a veranda over-grown with flowering vine and a little girl in a short white frock with a yellow satin bow in her kinky pigtail will wave a huge feather fan over us, stirring the languishing air as we sway in our hammock, this way and that way ... think how lovely it would be to live there." [10]

Jeanne recognises this pervy and racist fantasy for what it is: Go, where? Not there! Not the bloody parrot forest with its harsh blue sky which offers nothing to eat but bananas and yams and the occasional bit of grizzled goat to chew!

And many women of colour are rightly appalled by the way in which racism is smuggled into the bedroom disguised as something romantic and a form of positive discrimination. The young black feminist, Mysia Anderson, is quite right to say there's a history of oppression here that simply must be taken into account.

But, the problem is - for me, in my whiteness and heterosexual maleness - it still seduces. For ultimately, of course, it's a fetishistic fantasy designed to appeal to readers such as myself and not the black-thighed woman smelling of musk smeared on tobacco to whom it's spoken.

Thus, despite knowing better, I still find myself at the feet of a black goddess and still singing like Solomon about she whose beauty radiates from a skin darkened by the sun. 

Notes:

Charles Baudelaire's most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), contains several poems believed to have been written about (or inspired by) Jeanne Duval, including Sed non Satiata, Les Bijoux, Le Serpent qui danse, Parfum Exotique, and Le Chat.

Angela Carter's Black Venus was first published by Chatto and Windus (1985), but I'm quoting from the Picador edition (1986).

Mysia Anderson is a student at Stanford University majoring in African and African American Studies. Her online article entitled 'Avoid racial fetishism on Valentine's Day' was published on Feb 11, 2015 on stanforddaily.com and can be read by clicking here. 

The photo, by Barron Claiborne, was found on Lamatamu.com the site for "everything exotic", edited by Biko Beauttah.