The Drama of Lynching in Two Blackwomen's Drama, or Relating Grimké's Rachel to Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun

The Drama of Lynching in Two Blackwomen's Drama, or Relating Grimke's Rachel to Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun ANGELETTA KM GOURDINE This discussion rests on the premise that Blackwomen's drama manifests the consequences of a reality, both lived and textual, of interrelated racial and sexual oppression. Generally, I argue that through the genre of drama, blackwomen expose the encoding of racial subjugation in the gendered text of black male experience, particularly the historical text of physical and tropological lynching. In the discussion that follows, the word "drama" refers to drama as a literary genre, while the word "drama" refers to a specific dmmatic strategy in Angelina Weld Grimke's Rachel ([9[6) and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1958).' Unlike written literary forms, stage drama provides the audience with a physical experience of the realities presented. Though these realities are represented realities, the act of "play" transfonns them into representations not of the text or script, but of the lives associated with the physical forms that move across the stage. The idea of "play" exists, like the genre of drama and its emphasis on role appropriation or playing a part, on the plane of ritual. That is, we are always at play, playing out the various roles we have taken on or been assigned - and have accepted - in our daily lives. By analogy, dramatists assume control over the actions of the actors, who are resigned to playing their parts, assuming their roles. "Play" takes place when the social or self-control over action has been relaxed. This understanding of "play," as manifested in Rachel and Raisin, almost certainly has as its prototypical frame the masterslave relalionship.2Seen in this manner, there is in the genre of drama aparticularly compelling link between lived and textual realities. In a sense, drama provides the viewer with an opportunity for imaging or imagining the actuality of the story that the script contains. This type of drama is especially poignant when crafted by blackwomen because it responds to what Patricia R. Schroeder thinks of as the realities of raciogendered life. What I am describing here as the act of "play" within a Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 533 534 ANGELETTA KM GOURDINE play is defined by Schroeder as "the mimetic power of theatre to mirror reality in an unmediated way.") Her analysis of Rachel articulates the play's voicing of a precisely feminist position at a time in history when blackwomen's experiences were, as she writes, "largely effaced." Schroeder reads the playas "combating degrading sexual stereotypes as well as racial ones."4 However, I suggest that through the trope and the reality of lynching, Grimke - and later Hansberry - combat particularly racialized sexual stereotypes. Primarily, these plays defy the received opinion that lynching is or was only about black males and that blackwomen were merely emotional accessories of this attack on black males. In fact, it is this "replacing [of] stereotypical images of [blackwomen , which was] of paramount importance"S to Grimke and Hansberry, that constitutes their drama. I take my construct of drama from the saying in African American speech, "you are giving much drama." The relationship between this behavior and the genre is symbiotic; both involve a degree of play. Drama takes, basically, two forms. First, it can be an intentionally hyper-conscious emotional demonstration aroused by a word or deed insulting or damaging to the actor. Or, drama can take place when an event outside of the actor's control significantly affects his or her life. Like drama, drama is directed by someone else. Geneva Smitherman further suggests that drama refers not only to the emotion acted, but to the precipitating event. According to her, drama refers to a "negative intensely emotional experience or event; emotional distress exaggerated for effect.,,6 The emphasis in Smithennan's comment is on exaggeration. for it is in this exaggeration that play manifests itself. I am not suggesting that the pain is not real, or that the feeling is not intense or significant. The exaggeration communicates the intensity of the experience and allows someone unfamiliar with the actor or unaware of the event to appreciate the "damage." The subjects...