Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race

2. “A Very Fine Negress”

G&S Typesetters PDF proof “A Very Fine Negress” “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her,” Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own in 19291. Measuring the degrees of irony that raise the temperature of the debate about gender and colonialism, modernism and primitivism, race and nation, in this passage or in its individual words, as they traverse a particular modernist metropolitan passage/flanerie, cannot relieve it of the burden of racism . Even as an empty boast, it is full; as an alibi, it incriminates. If Virginia Woolf ’s negress recalls Baudelaire’s poetic “negress,” as well as the real Jeanne Duval and all the African women gazed at, written about, photographed , and measured by anthropologists and Western travelers and fantasized , fetishized, dreamed about, and demonized—as in the diaries of Michel Leiris or the paintings of Picasso—she is also very much the embodiment of Woolf ’s own anxiety about the limits of her double narrative of female emancipation and the history of women artists in England.2 However sharp the social pain the passage produces in the reader, we cannot make this particular subaltern speak. We can, however, undertake certain feminist historical rereadings to contextualize the specific procreative presence of the racialized other, the erotic and maternal Black woman at the intersection of low modernism and high, to think about the gender of the racialized gaze and the nature of this particular European vision of the heart of darkness. We can look at the way Woolf authorizes her portrait of the Englishwoman as a white slave (“she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger,” 45) in the field of gender trouble in the scopic regime of the master/slave dialectic, by appropriating the history of bondage of the black body to tell the story of the white woman’s oppression . The stillness of the figure of the fine negress signifies both bondage and otherness in the narrative of white women moving and struggling for freedom , a passage into national subjectivity that her passage from African identity to slavery has underwritten. A Room’s specific status as a tract in the campaign for women’s suffrage can be recalled, in which Woolf ’s polemical 2 02-R2807 11/3/03 12:45 PM Page 24 G&S Typesetters PDF proof pamphlet employs the trope of interruption to acknowledge the historical moment in the suffrage movement when, under the leadership of the Pankhursts and their Women’s Social and Political Union, Englishwomen broke their political silence and publicly interrupted men’s debates.3 We may challenge as well A Room of One’s Own’s current status as fourth among the great English feminist emancipatory tracts. But, as Moira Ferguson makes clear in Subject to Others, white Englishwomen in the antislavery movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invented themselves as writers and politically conscious national subjects by portraying the slaves as oppressed and helpless objects. The strange presence of the “fine negress” in A Room may represent Woolf ’s unconscious recognition of an earlier pamphlet tradition in which white women “displaced anxieties about their own assumed powerlessness and inferiority onto their representations of slaves, . . . who in the process became more severely objectified and marginalized.”4 F E M I N I S T S A N D T H E T R O P E O F S L A V E RY If the figure of the “fine negress” is for Woolf and her readers in a sense locked into her role as the representation of slavery and racial terror, she cannot then be included in the figure “woman.” The black woman’s gender is there in Woolf ’s text, and in much of modernism, as what Homi Bhabha calls “the racial unchosen of cultural difference.”5 (It might be worth comparing the figure of the Jew and the Jewish woman in modernism , particularly in fascist writing and painting.) “Indelible like the skin of the Black,” William Thompson argued, the “brand of inferiority” was stamped on women from the beginning. And John Stuart Mill wrote: “I am far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is.”6 We may ask...