Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore

Conclusion

C O N C L U S I O N The nature of courtship and marriage defies precise explanations. Love, mate selection, and decisions made regarding a relationship are often unfathomable to the outsider. This may be especially true of one examining a romantic liaison from another century. However, one may examine evidence that has been left behind to see what a courtship and marriage reveals of similar past experiences. The courtship and marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar demonstrate the difficulties that could befall elite African American relationships in the late nineteenth century. While the Dunbar liaison was a highly personal one driven by their personalities, it was also a union shaped and influenced by social forces. In their attempt to construct a model relationship based on the romantic ideal and middle-class values, Alice and Paul experienced the pressures of racism, gender role expectations, and unequal power relations. By taking a close look at the Dunbars’ relationship, our understanding of the intimate lives of elite African American men and women may be enhanced. Unlike their Euro-American middle-class counterparts, people of color had love lives pervaded by racism. American attitudes taught the inferiority of an African heritage. This racism engulfed the nation, determining the economic, social, and political rights of African Americans . Bigotry created a dynamic in these courtships and marriages that was unparalleled in mainstream liaisons. This xenophobia privileging white over black caused many African Americans to insist on mulatto partners and to denigrate those of a darker hue. This could be a source of palpable tension—if not disgust—in couples like the Dunbars. Racism poisoned their relationship. Both were consumed with racial selfhatred . Paul viewed himself as an ugly, black boy at a time when black and ugly were synonymous. But he rejoiced when he was treated in England as if “I am entirely white!”1 Meanwhile, Alice constructed a self that emphasized a nonracial Creole essence. Their racial self-ha-| 176 | tred was not limited to themselves since both exhibited great dislike for African American others. Paul simultaneously loved and hated mulattoes , while the mulatto Alice spoke in unflattering terms of people with dark skin tones. Their dislike of the African self encompassed all people of color. Do this for “the good of the race which we both dislike ,” wrote Paul to Alice.2 Racism circumscribed the life blood of upwardly mobile African Americans. It determined how male partners could structure realistic goals and limited the means in which men could support families in the patriarchal society of late-nineteenth-century America. Marriage experts agree that economic and financial strain can ruin relationships. The fact that Paul could best maintain his chosen lifestyle by writing dialect material disparaging blacks fueled the hostility he so often directed toward Alice. And she, who hated the genre and could be most contentious, accused him of prostituting his great art. Other social forces shaped the Dunbars’ romance. Alice and Paul believed their relationship was based on the ideology of romantic love, a concept cultivated during courtship. Believers imbued love and sex with morally and emotionally charged meanings. Love was an overwhelming sensation; it was the only legitimate basis of marriage; it was the key to domestic harmony. Romantic love involved mutuality, commonality, and sympathy between men and women. The class- and gender-driven society of separate spheres that Paul and Alice inhabited was not compatible with the concept of romantic love. Under separate spheres, men were superior to women, with the latter confined to a narrow circle of domestic life focusing on children, husband , and home. This world was subordinate to men’s world of commerce and politics. Piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity were the virtues widely prescribed for women. In most respects, their situation was one of extreme dependence. Unequal partnerships between men and women are ill-suited to romance and marital happiness. Feminist Susan B. Anthony recognized this incompatibility of love and separate spheres. Love could never exist where man ruled woman, man owned woman, she wrote. Anthony saw a harmonious relationship as the “real marriage of souls when two people take each other on terms of perfect equality, without the desire to control the other. . . . [This] is a beautiful thing. It is the truest and highest state of all.”3 Conclusion| 177 | The gender-segregated lives of men and women generated emotional distances between them...