The role of literature

Reading fiction could play an important part in a woman’s private life. In the 18^th century, the novel first came into its own as a genre; Tom Jones, Clarissa won a large audience. In their substitution of individualized, realistic plots for the traditional ones taken from history and mythology, novels were different from earlier prose fiction: the classical unities of place and time were broken and characters became real people that lead lives like those of their readers.

Young women were taught to be vulnerable to the attraction of irresponsibility and passion as depicted in novels, and only few observers credited women with a catholicity of tastes and interest approaching great novelists of the time. It was believed that romantic fiction could affect its readers actual behavior. John Trumbull expressed the fears and dangers in the following lines:

We own that ladies sometimes read,

And grieve that reading is confined

To books that poison the entire mind

The bluster of romance, that fills

The head brimful of purling rills.

And swells the mind with haughty fancies

For while she reads romance, the Fair one

Fails not to think Herself the Heroine(qtd. in Kerber 1980: 240).

American historians have come to the conclusion that Rousseau had had little appeal for Americans of his own generation. The author stated that he was not even quoted in the debates at the Constitutional Convention and major political theorists like Madison, Jefferson, and Adams made little use of his work. The Social Contract was available in the American libraries only in the 19^th century. The Americans found it either perplexing or frightening. Rousseau’s work like Emile and Heloise brought a revolutionary perspective on women’s role in society. Emile ’s Sophie provided the terms for much debate on the appropriate education for women. The extensive didactic literature, critical of women’s interest in fiction, served an implicit political purpose. This aimed at what women ought to be and attempted to persuade women to emulate one social type, Roman, at the expense of another, the romantic, its substituted civic virtue for passion.

If women were not to read fiction, what ought they to read? Admonitions against novel reading were characteristically accompanied by the recommendation that women read history instead. However the line between the novel and history was not clear. Linda Kerber asserted that Samuel Richardson’s implicit promise that he would report human experience in accurate detail, seems to have had a historical dimension, and the immense care novelists took to render a setting accurately suggests an interest historians would have. When women were urged to read history instead of fiction, they persisted in their assumption of fiction (Kerber 1980: 235–256).

Education

The new attitudes towards housekeeping were reflected in satires in the popular press that suggested that housework was undervalued and should be modernized and made rational. These satires were written from the point of view of a woman who sought to maintain an ordinary household only to be outdone by a selfish husband blind to the significance of her work.

The years immediately after the Revolution witnessed a great expansion of educational opportunity, an expansion sustained by the belief that the success of the Republican experiment demanded a well-educated citizenry. Reading, writing, arithmetic, geography and history were subjects that were taught in primary schools. The purpose of these institutions was to instruct the mass of our citizens in their rights, interests and duties as men and women. The interest in formal education was encouraged by industrial developments that put a premium on certain basic intellectual skills. Patterns for educating the rising generation proliferated. The need for literate workers would translate into heightened economic and intellectual opportunity for teachers who found their skills in demand.

Institutions for boy’s education seem to flourish in the early Republic. But it was not the same for girls. The reason for this disparity reached back into the history of Western thought. It was believed that women’s energies should be fully devoted to the service of their family. If learning was intended to prepare young men for active roles in the public sector and for service to the state, the shelter of the household seemed to make sophisticated learning of little use to a woman. The first European academic institutions had been church related and were intended to prepare men for the clerical life; the colleges at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and Bologna which developed and fixed the definition of classical education, were made preserves.

Educational options for girls were far more limited than they were for boys. In the Royal American Magazine there was a question: How many female minds rich with native genius and noble sentiment have been lost to the world and all their mental treasures buried in oblivion? The closing of the literacy gap between American men and women could be dated sometime between 1780–1850. Major improvements in female education took place between 1790–1830. No social change in the early Republic affected women more emphatically than the improvement of schooling which opened the way into the modern world.

A woman who is conscious of possessing more intellectual power than is requisite in superintending the pantry, and in adjusting the ceremonials of a feast, and who believes she is conforming to the will of the giver, in improving the gift, is by the wits of the other sex denominated a learned lady. She is represented as disgustingly slovenly in her person, indecent in her habits, imperious to her husband and negligent of her children. And the odious scare-crow is employed, exactly as the farmer employs his unsightly bundle of rugs and straw, to terrify the simple birds from picking up the precious grain, which he wishes to monopolize. After all this what man in his sober senses can be astonished, to find the majority of women as they really are, frivolous and volatile; incapable of estimating their own dignity and indifferent to the best interests of society? (Kerber 1980: 198).

Between 1890–1830 facilities for girls’ education expanded and improved making possible the closing of the gap. The reasons for that are related both to political and industrial revolution. Within the families the crucial role was thought to be that of the mother’s. She taught them their lessons, shaped their moral conduct. Mothers were very responsible, so they had to be well informed and decently educated.

The education of young women had traditionally been an education for marriage. Girls were said to need a new kind of education because their traditional training had been superficial and their resulting behavior shallow. The model Republican mother was competent and confident. The creation of such women in America became a major educational challenge. Since women were not prepared for the traditional professions- law, medicine, the clergy- teachers could not easily assume that girls ought to have the same studies as the boys did. There arose a question: For what profession were the girls prepared? They should be able to write and converse elegantly and correctly, pronounce French, read history and geography.

L. Kerber presents Rousseau’s definition of a woman’s sphere which is a limited one. He asserted that the empire of women is the empire of softness, of address, of complacency; her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears. According to the author, the domestic function of the preindustrial woman had needed little ideological justification. Someone had to keep the spinning wheel turning, and the open hearth fire constantly tended, and the nursing mother was the obvious one to do that. The Revolution created a public ideology of individual responsibility and virtue just before industrial machinery began to free middle class women from some of their unremitting toil and to propel lower class women more fully into the public economy. The well educated Republican women would stay in their homes, would shape the characters of their sons and husbands in the direction of self-restraint and responsible independence (ibidem: 189–231).

Elizabeth M. Sewell states that the purpose of education is to make children fit for the position in life which they are to occupy. Boys are to go out into the world and stand up to its temptations, to mingle with bad and good, to govern and direct. On the other hand, girls are to live in quiet homes, amongst a few friends, to be submissive and retiring. There is no doubt that girls can be made to learn as much and as well as boys. In the 19^th century there were still separate educational institutions for girls and for boys. Thus, at that time if someone were to take a school of boys and of girls and compare them, the probability was that the latter would be found superior. The boys were considered to develop at an earlier age and more rapidly (Sewell 1981: 69).

Eliza Bisbee Duffey (1981: 70) asserted that the boy is allowed to be natural; the girl is forced to be artificial. Some girls break through all restraints, but they are not the model ones whom mothers delight in and visitors praise for being lady-like. They need to be equally hardened by the storms, tanned by the winds and have limbs strengthened by unrestrained exercise. But instead of this equality, while boys have their liberty more or less freely granted them, girls must stay at home and sew and read and play prettily and quietly and take demure walks. The writer refers not only to girls in a single stratum of society, but to girls everywhere, from the highest down almost to the lowest, everywhere the word lady is reverenced.

On account of the fact that restraint is never lifted from them, girls whose energies are still at their most powerful, have no opportunity for working off their surplus vitality in boisterous ways. To be at the head of their class, to receive the highest mark of merit, is their ruling ambition. Bisbee Duffey made the following assertion:

If there is really a radical mental difference in men and women, you cannot educate them alike, however much you try. If women cannot study unremittingly, why then they will not and you cannot make them. But because they do, because they choose so to do, because they will do so in spite of you, should be accepted as evidence that they can, and all other things being equal, can with impunity. Instead of our race dying out through these women, they are the hope of the country…who will keep pace with men. (ibidem: 70–71)

The private realm

The condition of women is depicted as follows in Women in the Nineteenth Century, by Margaret Fuller. The bone, of which Eve was made, was taken neither from the head, nor the feet of Adam, but from his side, to indicate that woman should be the equal not the mistress or the slave of man. To that equality she has been elevated in all things in which that equality was either practicable or desirable. Women have claimed an equal right of representation, insisted on a share in the legislative councils and contended for a similar mode of education. Fuller says that the temperaments of individual woman differ much less one from the other, than those of men. The former have much more enthusiasm than men. Thus every passion which springs solely from the heart burns in them with brilliancy unknown to the condition of men. The woman carries the feeling of love into every concern of life and extends it even to her religion and politics. As for feelings of courage, men and women differ widely. He is characterized by bravery, she–by fortitude. He rushes into dangers and engages in contests from which she shrinks.

Imagination reigns predominant in woman. So great is her susceptibility that she jumps with facility from one feeling to another. Woman, thus timid, gentle and dependent must yield to man, the rough and rugged paths of life. She was not made for tumultuous assemblies, for the complexity of politics. She is the queen of the hearth. Those who would drag her from this modest retirement, to which she has been appointed by the fiat of her nature, would rob her character of its fairest charm. In attempting to grasp the scepter of an empire which her feeble strength can scarcely lift, woman loses the sovereignty of the heart where she has even reigned with unrivalled sway (Fuller 1998: 216–220).

Reghina Dascăl stated that patriarchal societies, stretching from the classical polis of ancient Greece and Rome to the rural communities of today, have always tried to obliterate the ideological aspects of their constructs of legally binding norms and hierarchies. The symbolic organization of space serves a clearly defined educational purpose. For an oral society, the house is no longer a mere shelter; it is a way of communication, a place of ritual, a locus of economic activity. The house not only focuses but it also activates a whole series of homologies and equivalences, opening the way to the understanding of an array of cultural, social, humanist values. The author sees the house as a matrix of intelligibility that enables the coherent articulation of the values and ethos generated by a certain culture, by a system of beliefs, customs, unwritten laws, all of these being projections of a specific mentality. The habitat teaches citizens to accept the relentless rule of laws, to relate to the outside world as to a coherent organism.

For the family, the house is a second body; it is a second identity that ensures the bestowal of social status. The domestic space, being sacred, no one was allowed entry without the master’s assent. That is why the houses were left unlocked during the day, a sign of the fundamental openness and honesty of the locals. The deep rooted habit enforced total respect of property, no one being allowed to cross the threshold of a house whose master was not in (Dascăl 1999; 2004). According to Aries and Duby (1994: 203), all over Europe in the Middle Ages and for many centuries afterwards, the house constituted an inviolable space. Whoever trespassed on private property, could expect harsh punishments. There were signs of the master’s absence: a hammer, an axe, or club laid across the threshold or leaning against the wooden gate or door handle. The master of the family was a pater familia and the house was under the protection of the ancestors.

According to Betty Friedan, women faced a problem that had no name. She refers here to the fact that women’s existence was confined to the household, and they felt unhappy, something was missing there. In the 20^th century they were encouraged by means of books and articles written by experts to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. They were to become queens of their own house. They were taught not to follow the example of the unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to assert themselves in the public sphere. They learned that:

Truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights–the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for (Friedan 1965:13).

Nobody could deny the fact that at home we find our place where we feel safe, relieved; here we find the silence we need, but we cannot limit our existence to the boundaries of our household. As Betty Friedan stated in her The Feminine Mystique, women faced a crisis in their identity. They came to ask themselves if all they really wanted was to be the heroines of their house. The writer points out the fact that the feminine mystique permits women to ignore the question of their identity; they can answer the question “who am I? by saying “Tom’s wife…Mary’s mother’’ (ibidem: 63).

George Barna (1990: 67) describes how family as a concept undergoes changes. The traditional family as a unit–the working father and the mother who stays at home to care for the children has been replaced by a different type of household. In 1960 the stereotypical family type represented 60 percent of all households; today it reflects just 7% of all households. The average American family in 1990 consists of a married couple with one child in which both parents are employed. At least one part is likely to have been divorced. Parents are having fewer children and having them later in life. The ideals of women in the ‘50s and ‘60s revolved around motherhood and home. In the ‘70s and ‘80s increasingly the dream focused upon being accepted as an equal in the labor force and having fewer family related constraints. Today women deem that it is their right to be a mother and a career woman. In the same way Lorna Hutson notes:

Versions of Xenophon’s natural history of the division of household labor according to the scheme of husband ‘outdoors’ and wife ‘indoors’ seem to have been relevant to the humanist project in a variety of ways. What made the model so compelling? Nothing to do with the production of a sphere of influence for the wife. For the cultural significance of this natural history concerns men: its function in the 16^th century was not to legitimate a new version of femininity, but a new version of masculinity. The point of it was not to guarantee in reality the husband’s governance of his wife, but to prove, through a persuasive fiction of the well governed wife, the legitimate and responsible contribution of a Christian humanist education to the secular and practical spheres of masculine activity. For it was only through the definition of conjugal femininity as the symbolic boundary of ‘good husbandry’ (the displaced marker of the husband’s accountability as head of the household) that good husbandry could come to claim as its sphere nothing less than ‘out of boundless’ itself- the time / space of opportunity, both for negotiation and for the production of rhetorically persuasive fictions (Hutson 1999: 85).

Conclusions

In early times women faced a crisis of their identity, they wanted to accomplish more than what traditional society ascribed to them. Great progress has been made, but there are still many women nowadays who face difficulties in this respect. A series of fields are not wide open for them, for example politics. Today it is not desirable to assert about a person that he / she belongs exclusively to one sphere or another that is public or private. Both spheres are intermingled in our lives, but the responsibilities are not always equal for men and women. The ideal for us is to see who we really are and what we can really achieve. The 19^th century represents women’s desire to cross the boundaries of the private sphere so as to assert themselves in the public area. They managed to do this through education. It was not easy at all, as any nontraditional activity was seen as unnatural.

References

Aries, Philipp and George Duby. 1994. Istoria vieţii private, vol. II. Bucharest: Meridiane.

Barna, George. 1990. The Frog in the Kettle: What Christians Need to Know about Life in the Year 2000. Ventura: Regal Books.

Bisbee Duffey, Eliza. 1981. Female Health and the Education of Girls in England and the United States. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Dascăl, Reghina. 1999. Casă / Locuire. Timişoara: Editura Eurostampa.

--. 2001. Feminist Perspective. Timişoara: Editura Universitặţii de Vest.

Elshtain, Jean. B. 1993. Public Man, Private Woman–Women in Social and Political Thought. New Jersey: University Press.

Friedan, B. 1965. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin Books.

Fuller, Margaret. 1998. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Norton and Company, Inc.

Hutson, Lorna. 1999. The Housewife and the Humanists within Feminism and Renaissance Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kerber, Linda. 1980. Women of the Republic. Virginia: The University and North Carolina Press.

Mill, John. S. and T. Harriet. 1970. Essays on Sex Equality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Sewell, Elizabeth M. 1981. “Female Health and the Education of Girls in England and the United States.” In Victorian Women–A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth Century England, France and the United States of America, edited by Erna H. Olafson, Leslie. H. Parker and Karen M. Offen. 68–69. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Chapter Eleven

The Otherness of the Moor

in Elizabethan England

Liliana Tronea-Ghidel

Introduction

In the present paper we will try to define the general framework of the word race, which entered into the English language in the sixteenth century. Meanings of the term in the sixteenth century included, among others, “wines with a characteristic flavor”, “people with a common occupation”, and “generation”. The meaning of “tribe” or “nation” emerged in the seventeenth century. The modern meaning, “one of the major divisions of mankind”, dates to the late eighteenth century, but it never became exclusive. Irrespective of its numerous meanings, the main use of the term was related to lineage, which explains such uses as in “the race of man”, “the race of animals”, and even “the race of minerals”. Only towards the middle to late seventeenth century, did the term come to be associated with people of common physical features and skin colour. It means an obvious shift in the perception of race and the general status of black-skinned people in the Western world. The English were fascinated with and afraid of the African’s blackness, which is explained by their own whiteness and the standard understanding of the contrast between the two.

To begin with, the London of Shakespeare’s time–Tudor London–underwent a major transformation: what had previously been a medieval city, in which economic and political power was based mostly on the guild system and the church, now become a worldwide trading centre and the headquarters of the national government. The power belonged to the merchants and the crown or, during the English Civil War, Parliament. Even the structure of the city changed: during the Reformation, church properties were redistributed, the City was rebuilt after the Great Fire (1666), and it expanded in areas outside the City boundaries. Gradually, the City turned into the business centre of the nation, with the aristocracy mainly settled into the western neighborhoods of London which were to become the hub of the capital’s social life.

The present-day cosmopolitan aspect of London seems to find its roots much earlier, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, as it becomes obvious from a much quoted open letter, Queen Elizabeth to the Lord Mayor et al., sent by Queen Elizabeth I herself to the Lord Mayor of London. The Queen asked that immediate action be taken against the presence of so many Blackamoors in London and in the country at large; the said inhabitants are prone to idleness, due to the shortage of jobs available (to put it into modern jargon):

An open le[tt]re to the L[ord] Maiour of London and th’alermen his brethren, And to all other Maiours, Sheryfes, &c. Her Ma[jes]tie understanding that there are of late divers Blackmoores brought into this Realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie, consideringe howe God hath blessed this land w[i]th great increase of people of our owne Nation as anie Countrie in the world, wherof manie for want of Service and meanes to sett them on worck fall to Idlenesse and to great extremytie; Her Ma[jesty’]s pleasure therefore ys, that those kinde of people should be sent out of the lande. And for that purpose there ys direction given to this bearer Edwarde Banes to take of those Blackmoores that in this last voyage under Sir Thomas Baskervile, were brought into this Realme. Wherein wee Req[uire] you to be aydinge & Assysting unto him as he shall have occacion, and therefore not to faile. (Dasent 1902: 16–17).

The Queen was not satisfied with the results, and one week later she resumed the matter of the Blackamoors, by expressing her “good pleasure to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande” and commissioned the merchant Casper van Senden–a merchant from Lübeck–to “take up” certain “blackamoores here in this realme and to transport them into Spaine and Portugall.” (ibidem: 20–21). Finally, in 1601, she complained again about the “great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which (as she is informed) are crept into this realm,” defamed them as “infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel,” and, one last time, authorized their deportation (Jones 1971:20; see also Hughes and Larkin 1969: 221–222).

Some of the words in the Queen’s letter commented by Emily Bartels shed light on the reality of Shakespeare’s time: the Blackamoors had “of late” been “brought into this realme” or “are crept into this realm”–they did not simply relocate in England willingly; and there were already too many of them in the country. The Queen’s reason for requesting their deportation to Spain and Portugal is that they are “infidels,” that is non-Christian, and “having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel,” which–to the head of the Church of England–was an unpardonable sin. (Bartels 2006: 305-332). Obviously the discrimination we are witnessing is religious in nature, not overtly racist. One more detail: the Queen mentions both “Negars” and “Blackamoors” which, in contemporary English translates as Negroes (or Africans), and Black Moors (or dark-skinned Arabs). It is an interesting detail which might explain Shakespeare’s models for Othello. Nevertheless, the Queen’s open letter has often been interpreted as a strategy for avoiding the social problems of her reign and an attempt to put the blame on these instantly recognisable outsiders in the country.

The Queen’s reference to “Negars and Blackamoors” as opposed to her English subjects–whom she calls “her own liege people”–draws a clear-cut distinction between the two categories, preventing the Africans from becoming Englishmen. They are regarded as a completely different nation, defined by their skin color; the Queen’s statement is replete with the interpretation of Africans as undesired infidels. We should not forget that these contested Africans were also the slaves of England’s political rival Spain. It was a rivalry of a special kind: as the notion of blackness was imbued with notions of political and cultural inferiority, the two powers were drawn together by their whiteness and European heritage.

Blackamoors

According to Karl E. Westhauser (cited in Sharon Tewksbury-Bloom 2000), ever since their appearance in Queen Elizabeth I’s Realm, black people were the subject matter of a “multicultural ideology.” Though the examples given refer to a much later period, more than half a century after Shakespeare’s death, the basic idea is that Africans attending the parades marking the annual celebrations of the inauguration of the New Lord Mayor of London “presented conflicting understandings of race.” The explanation resides in the special status conferred to Africans partaking in the parades. No longer considered inferior, Africans and Asians alike were seen as worthy representatives of their nations. This is all closely connected with the developments in cartography and map printing; far from being the extremities of the known world, Asia and Africa were essentially presented as equals (Westhauser 2000: 112–122). The Queen was right, after all: the growth of the slave trade–with Liverpool and Bristol becoming major slave ports–brought about an increase in the number of Africans in England, and, consequently, more and more encounters between the English and Africans, which turned Africans into “elements of fascination and fear” (Craton 1974: 14–22).

Before the seventeenth century there were differences among people, in most cases supported by religion as the major source of discrimination and categorization. The 17^th century Englishmen were becoming more conscious of the differences between themselves and Africans, with whom they could not easily identify, and were right to question the nature of such differences. What they needed was a logical, biological explanation that would put an end to the impulse “to wash an Ethiop white.” Attempts to wash away the “natural infection” of blackness were more than mere aversion to the colour of the skin; they were expressions of deeply embedded and widely understood associations of African inferiority. Blackness was quickly becoming a key signifier of a much broader, indelible inferiority. To cite Tewksbury-Bloom (2000: 45), “blacks had to be different on an elemental level before one could justify treating them like animals or supernatural beings.”

Whether we like it or not, the Englishmen’s perception of race was closely connected to and dependent on the institution of slavery. Even though African slavery was well entrenched in southern Europe by the middle of the sixteenth century, the same cannot be said of northern Europe. In England, far removed from enslaveable, non-European peoples, the institution of slavery was a distant historical memory. England’s geographic and social distance from the contested borderlands of Christian Europe and the “heathen” lands of Africa rendered slavery far less resonant than in Spain and Portugal. If anything, this isolation from non-Christian, “uncivilized” peoples led to heightened expectations for individual rights. Where there were few “outsiders,” individual freedoms became the norm, a signal characteristic of English identity. As Jordan Winthrop has put it, “after about [1550] there began to develop in England that preening consciousness of the peculiar glories of English liberties.” (Winthrop 1968: 49)

These “peculiar glories” did not go unnoticed by those who were familiar with slavery elsewhere in Europe. In 1577, William Harrison said,

As for slaves and bondmen we have none, naie such is the privilege of our contrie by the especiall grace of God, and bountie of our princes, that if anie come hither from other realms, so soone as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterlie remooved from them (Collins 2012: 109).

Who were, then, the “blackamoors” who were upsetting the Queen so much as to make her demand their deportation from the Realm?

As early as 1600, and following Richard Hakluyt’s advice, John Pory published Leo Africanus’s A Geographical Description of Africa, an account of the Spanish wars against the Moors, entitled The History and Description of Africa. Pory’s overall opinion of the Moors of North Africa is more than favourable: “This is the most noble and worthie region of all Africa, the inhabitants whereof are of a browne or tawnie colour, being a ciuill people, and prescribe wholesome lawes and constitutions unto themseleus”.

3. The Elizabethans’ perception of the “Moor”

The Elizabethans’ perception of the “Moor” was more comprehensive than it is today. They had a clear-cut knowledge of the Muslims who were either Turks or Arabs, but–due to numerous reports from travellers–Ethiopians and other Africans were often taken for Muslims. Othello himself is often described as “black”: statistics mention as many of fifty-six uses of the word in the play.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “black” applies to Negros and other non-European races, which leads to a complete exclusion of the Other from civilized, European identity. For us, “black” means “African,” but for Shakespeare’s audience–so familiar with the presence of “blackamoors” in the streets of London, the term black could equally apply to Arabs.

It is not easy to determine and evaluate the reaction of the people in Early Modern England towards real black people in the streets of London, or in the harbor towns more or less connected with the trafficking of black slaves. Presumably they experienced an assortment of feelings, from fascination and a taste for the exotic, as a result of strangeness and mystery, to distrust and even hostility, triggered by prejudice and fear of the (unknown) other. Such hostility had its own reasons, and one of them was the widespread belief that black people–irrespective of their belonging to a nation or another–were all descendants of the Biblical Ham (the Genesis), wearing their blackness as a punishment for their sins, the foremost of all being sexual excess–one of the attributes of the prototype black. In his Geographical History of Africa, Leo Africanus lists a number of other attributes which he associates with black people: courage, pride, guiltlessness, credulity, and a passionate nature.

There was a common general assumption that early modern citizens of London had scarcely seen a black face, which–because of Shakespeare’s Othello –is now contradicted by modern scholarship. One example is Islam in Britain 1558-1685, an interesting study by Nabil Matar, who contradicts this assumption by stating that there was no insurmountable geographic and cultural gap separating Muslims in the Near East and Northern Africa from English Christians. According to Matar, during the Elizabethan and Jacobean Ages the English had ample opportunities to meet and trade with the Turks and Moors who visited in great numbers the ports of England and Wales (Nabill 1999). The matter of the black presence in Early Modern England was also commented on by the American scholar Imtiaz Habib, author of Shakespeare and Race,who–after examining original documents of Elizabethan Age, such as parish registries–came to the conclusion that there were black people in London in the seventeenth century. He had access to a rich corpus of documents which were the end result of the official campaign to banish the Catholic Church and its followers to the advantage of the Church of England. Many of the documents of the time contained valuable information for the researcher, and offered details regarding different professions taken up by black people, and even information on the social relationships that were gradually being established. Private accounts, such as personal diaries, were taken into account, such as Lady Anne Clifford’s diary in which she refers to Grace, her black laundress.

One interesting detail, which might account for the plot of such a play as Othello, is evidence of the presence of interracial couples and their offspring in Tudor London. Thus Shakespeare had ample reason to refer to racial relations in his plays, and to examine the unavoidable tensions in such a way that suited the taste of the Elizabethan playgoers. It also gave Habib plenty of reasons to conclude:

We now have documented proof of the residences of black people, which must be reckoned into the colors of Shakespeare’s world, in a very literal sense. Shakespeare knew people of color. He walked through their neighborhoods every day. […] What I’ve discovered, I think changes the contours of existing knowledge on the English Renaissance. What I have tried, and am trying to do, is to use the urgent lessons of the present to correct and supplement the legacies of the past (Habib 2000: 30-31).

The research conducted by Imtiaz Habib has greatly contributed to a new understanding of the significance of cultural politics in Tudor England. His is a close examination of the particular manner in which race and colonialism affected Elizabethan society, and vice-versa. The condition of black people in Europe was similar to those in America: they had not willingly left their African shores for a better life somewhere else. According to Habib, in the mid-1550s African coastal villages were frequently raided by such adventurers as John Hawkins, John Lok, and Martin Frobisher who kidnapped natives and transported them all the way to England. Habib concludes that these African slaves constituted “a totally culturally unrecorded and hence silent and invisible community” (ibidem: 35).

The Londoners of Shakespeare’s time were familiar with the presence of black people. Despite the thriving activity in the London harbor, the city itself was not that large, and it was also overcrowded. Then, Shakespeare, who was familiar with both the London pubs in the theatre district, and the aristocrats’ households where the theatre companies performed, was sure enough acquainted with the black faces he was meeting now and then. According to Cowhig,

The encounter with real blacks on the streets of London would have yielded a sense of their common humanity, which would have conflicted with the myths about their cultural, sexual and religious ‘otherness’ found in the travel books (Cowhig 1985: 302-305).

Conclusion

From our point of view, it cannot be said that Shakespeare’s choosing a black protagonist for Othello was the result of his having met blackamoors in the streets of London. Shakespeare addresses a number of issues about blackness and whiteness without fully answering them, and allows his audience to provide the answers. This act of deliberation involved a questioning of racial stereotypes. We do not know whether Shakespeare’s purpose was to unsettle or perplex his audience, but he succeeded beyond expectation.

We totally agree with Habib’s conclusion that race has been a difficult, elusive concept to define and develop upon. As regards to racial differences, present-day genetic studies have discovered that there are no significant variations that justisfy racial characterization of human beings.

In Shakespeare’s time, the Elizabethans’ notions of race were confused, because they combined Africans with Arabs, Indians with South Asians and pre-Columbian Americans. There is no written evidence of Shakespeare’s interaction with black people, but–with his keen eye for human behavior and the details of daily existence–he must have spent time analyzing the cultural differences between white and black people.

References

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Chapter Twelve

Urban Metaphors and Identity in Postmodern English-American

and Francophone literature

Alina Ţenescu

Introduction

Our experience of any urban space through the five senses cannot be separated from the social, cultural and psychological context of the experience. If to understand any place (be it a dwelling place or other) equates with having felt or experienced the uproar of street and the heat of a pavewalk, a city inhabitant might experience the sensations in a different manner, and remember, conceive and perceive them differently as compared to another city inhabitant. Urban spaces and places wear the fingerprint of a symbolism where reason and sensations operate together. Consequently, places within the urban landscape are linked to concrete spaces, but also to particular perceptions, to different subjective attitudes and to the relationship that us, as inhabitants or passengers, maintain with the peculiar spaces where we live or that we transit (Sansot, Dufrenne 2004).

As postmodern inhabitants and passengers through space, we are capable of conceiving different modalities of incorporating spatiality into our peculiar ways of being in the world, and ways of dealing with the challenge that the complex reality of space represents to us (Cresswell 2010). We start from the premise that urban space is related to the architecture of postmodern dwelling places in the city and space and that space is produced, constructed through and embedded in peculiar spatial and walking practices which the postmodern writer works with and incorporates in his work so as to render one of the essential features of the postmodern world he lives in.

When opening a proposition to a comparative approach to space in Postmodern English-American and Francophone literature, we contend that we can easily acknowledge urban space as a product of intersections and interrelations. Consequently, we assert that the urban space that emerges in postmodern fiction is also conceived through all kinds of interactions, starting from the immensity of the global to the most intimately flyspeck dwelling place. Under the influence of globalization, urban space is perceived and conceived of according to three chief traits: (1) space is produced and constructed through interrelations; (2) postmodern urban space opens the possibility of the existence of “multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality” (Massey 2005: 8–9); (3) urban space is continuously being constructed and reconstructed by postmodern citizens, inhabitants, passengers and their experience of particular places.

In order to better understand the way identity is conceived with reference to urban space, a useful starting point is to see that the city is defined through a richer imagery and a wider range of conceptual metaphors in postmodern English-American and Francophone literature, far wider so that it overpasses the general three-dimensional portrayal (space as product of interrelations, characterized by multiplicity and contemporaneous plurality and space as product or entity under constant construction and reconstruction). Our corpus of study is represented by excerpts from novels by three authors: a French writer (Luc Dietrich, L’apprentissage de la ville, ed. 1973), a Francophone writer (Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, 1992) from Martinique and an American writer (John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer,translation into French, 2000).

Our objective is to organize conceptualizations of urban space into several categories of cognitive metaphors related to urban space, using a model inspired by the research of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Focusing on an anthropologic-cognitive approach, using Lakoff and Johnson’s model and the comparatist method, we contend that, within our corpus of study, the most recurrent urban space metaphors are those of the city as a tumour, as a reversed reflection, as a long-stridden walk of surveyed space and as a realm for the manifestation of the urbachrist.

2. Urban imagery and spatial identity: experiencing, exploring and conceiving city space

Urban space is an abstract concept for a complex set of ideas (related to the body, to personal relations and spatial values). People of different ages and of different cultures, as well as characters populating the novels in our corpus of study differ from each other in how they face the challenges of space, in how they divide and split up their world and space, attribute values to its parts and then measure and comprehend them. Different manners in dividing up space, in organizing, representing and conceiving space vary hugely in degree of complexity and sophistication, (Segaud 2010), as do techniques and ways of judging distance, relations between individuals inside space and the structure of the human body in space and the space projected from the body and bodily experience. The writers’ and the characters’ representation of urban space as well as the readers’ perception are not anymore framed in conventional geographical and spatial categories, but they are shifted to and bring about a series of transformations and metamorphoses that occur as though they are shaped by strange forces and unconventional landmarks. This new vision of the urban landscape in postmodern prose is reflected by the wide range of symbols and metaphors in relationship to urban space. One of the recurrent metaphors found in our corpus of study is that of the city as a body tumour. The organicist-animist metaphor compares the city to a live architectural organism invaded by cancerous cells.

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