Performing Political Responsibility: Ralph and Fanny Ellison’s Appeal to Visual Arts

When Christopher McElroen sought the University of Iowa as a location for putting the finishing touches on his 2012 stage adaptation of Invisible Man, he was inspired by the intriguing convergence of Fanny Ellison’s and Ralph Ellison’s history in Iowa City. In 1936, Fanny McConnell earned her bachelor’s degree from the Department of Speech and Dramatic Art of the State University of Iowa, and in 1959, Ralph Ellison, who married Fanny in 1946, was invited to become the first African American faculty member in the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Examining their early training, as well as the creative work that shaped their professional paths, reveals both Ellisons’ enduring interest in art and performance. Although Ellison scholarship has not pursued their Iowa connection or the significance of the couple’s shared interest in visual art, McElroen recognized the rich possibilities of exploring this confluence as he fine-tuned his play. His twenty-first century interpretation of Ralph Ellison’s mid-twentieth-century novel celebrates the rare ability of the stage to foreground the human truths that Invisible Man explores. His staging also recalls both Ellisons’ investment in visual art to examine the politics of race.¹

McElroen’s attention to period costumes and sets evokes the historical moment that shaped Fanny Ellison’s and Ralph Ellison’s artistic and political sensibility. The protagonist of Invisible Man comes of age during the Jim Crow era and searches for his political voice during the pre–civil rights movement years, evolving along a similar trajectory as the Ellisons. The vivid role that plastic art occupies on McElroen’s stage cleverly portrays the power that visual images wield in molding intellectual, cultural, and political beliefs and subtly introduces Ralph Ellison’s investment in visual art aesthetics. For instance, in an early scene that re-creates the confrontation between Invisible Man and Bledsoe, the college president who keeps the naive protagonist running, McElroen features a large portrait of Booker T. Washington. As a set piece, the image of the Tuskegee president deepens the scene by introducing Ralph Ellison’s biographical history, the politics of Invisible Man’s college, and Washington’s appeal to photography to spread his educational and political philosophy.² More broadly, McElroen taps into the Ellisons’ dual investment in exploring the ability of visual art to engage complicated political positions. Taking a cue from McElroen’s stage adaptation, this article ponders Fanny Ellison’s engagement with visual media and particular artists and probes Ralph Ellison’s attention to specific paintings in his literary work to sharpen our understanding of their nuanced analysis of race relations in the twentieth-century United States.

Fanny Ellison’s Early Aesthetic: Theater, Art, and Cultural Pride

Fanny McConnell appealed to plastic art and performance to advance discussions of race long before she met Ralph Ellison in 1944.³ When she transferred from Fisk University to the University of Iowa in 1934, she changed her focus from literature to drama. As one of the few black undergraduates in Iowa’s cutting-edge theater arts program, she flourished, notwithstanding the many difficulties African American students encountered.⁴ The 1934–1935 theater season at Iowa found McConnell working on production crews for plays as disparate as Sidney Howard’s Yellow Jack and Susan Glaspell’s Allison’s House.⁵ She valued her undergraduate instruction, and the unwritten rules that prohibited African American students from acting onstage at Iowa failed to deter her. Instead, her undergraduate experiences fueled her passion for the stage. She viewed the theater as a space to challenge racial inequality without compromising artistic excellence.⁶

After graduation, McConnell channeled her theatrical training directly into addressing African American community concerns. She returned to Chicago, where she briefly taught speech and drama at the YMCA before joining the Board of Education of Museum Extension Aid. As a part of the Chicago Board, she served on the WPA Project for Visual Education Material, and in this capacity, she created wide-ranging lectures on costume design.⁷ These experiences increased McConnell’s confidence, and in March 1938, she founded the...