Double Consciousness and the Blues Overview

In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois stated that every black individual in America has a double-consciousness – a connection to his black roots and to the more public America that surrounds him.  The black self is the more private self, and the American self might be seen as the more public self. 

“One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” – W.E.B. DuBois, “Our Spiritual Strivings”

This relates to the frustration the American Negro has in being aware of his (and I use the “his” because this was DuBois’ viewpoint, not because I think this concept is restricted to males) own private self, and also seeing himself through the eyes of America.  Together, his private (Negro) self and his constant awareness of his public (American) self created a tension – a split – in the man.  Identification with the Negro self separates him from his American self (just as identification with our private selves can impair our public selves), and identification with the American self separates him from his Negro self (just as overidentification with our public selves can make us so public that we lose a sense of who our private selves really are).

DuBois’ solution in 1903 was that the Negro had a lot to offer America, so his "Negrohood" should be function as a contributor to, not a separation from, American culture.  If the Negro was seen as contributor to and thus collaborator of American culture, there would be no split between the Negro and the American – they would be working together.

In every African-American work we’ve looked at so far this semester, I’ve tried to show how this concept of double-consciousness has played an integral role in the development of story lines.

In “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” we discussed how Richard Wright identified strongly with blacks like his mother and others who commented on their lives as blacks, but we also talked about how he had to constantly struggle with seeing himself the way America saw him – whether it be in the arena of the workplace (his first job), the law (the woman who got picked up by a policeman for being drunk after she was beat up for not paying money), the social arena (the beer offered him), sex (the prostitution discussion and the watchman’s slap on the girl Wright walks with near the end), or education.  These were not the only issues discussed in this work (we also discussed the enforcement of “natural” standards in the beginning of the piece with the white boys having natural barriers to hide behind in the broken bottle/ cinders war, along with the violence held barely at bay lying just below the surface of the piece, as shown in the last lines, as well as, finally, the unsavory view Wright had of Christianity), but they were a series of examples that showed the union between the Negro self and the American self was a difficult one to keep together, and that it was constantly threatening to burst at the seams.

Another great example of this double consciousness occurs in Jean Toomer’s Cane.  Now, hold on here, because something just might click if you’re able to follow me the next few lines.

In “Blood-Burning Moon,” as we discussed in class, Bob and Tom are both defining Louisa.  In class, I said that Bob is being affected by the public (in that he was self-conscious about how he would look having a romantic relationship with a black woman) and by the private (in the sense of his personal attraction to her).  Tom is being affected by the public (in the sense that he wants to get a good job to provide for Louisa) and the private (in the sense that he is attracted to her).

Louisa, in being connected to both Bob and Tom, is attached to both White and Black.  If we are talking about oppositions through the eyes of double consciousness as described by DuBois, we could have on one side public/American/White/Bob and on the other private/Negro/Black/Tom.   There is a war between the two to determine which identity will be validated as a worthy manhood.  Masculinity needs femininity to be validated.  So, ironically, in Bob and Tom’s attempt to seek control over Louisa, they make Louisa the individual who has the most control over their definitions as men.  And that power of definition leads to the demise of both men, because both sides collapse largely because of the way they are defined by Louisa’s presence.

When we discussed this dynamic, we talked a bit about the moon.  At first, I said that the “sun” side of the moon was societal definition, and the other was the way society viewed this definition.  The moon was the individual.  So, in other words, society defines the individual, and the individual reflects that definition back to society.

(If you think about it this way, it may make more sense:  your “private” self as we think of it today didn’t really become a prominent concept until Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century.  Thus, today there is the thought that the private self is actually a creation of society – external social forces construct a definition of what “private” means for you, and you accept it.  This brings up the next question:  who is this "you" that social forces construct this private self for? 

The answer to this question has no clear answer in criticism yet.  We don’t know what this “you” looks like, because every time we think we’ve found it, we give it adjectives – like “black,” or “poor,” or “female,” – that show that we haven’t fully located this “you” and that we still are discussing a private self that is constructed by societal concepts of race, class, gender, or spirituality.

Don’t stop reading – keep going.  This is important, especially if these concepts were difficult for you to “get” in class.

The next question to ask is, "How do you distinguish between the public self and the private self if both are social constructions"?

An answer in the discussion of gender studies is that it's one thing to feel a definition, and it's another to represent that definition to someone outside yourself. Have you ever been sore somewhere and allowed the doctor to touch a part of you to see if it hurt?  It was one thing for him to create the private, personal experience for you by pressing a part of your body (thus defining your private self), and another for him to request your expression of that experience by asking whether or not the experience was painful for you (thus eliciting your public self). 

As a parellel, for DuBois, the black self is formed by private, personal experience that is brought on by several external factors (including a sense of historical African heritage and current life in America), and the public American self is the struggle to express that experience to a culture that is outside of it -- a culture that is one of the factors that defines that private experience while also being distinct from it -- just as the doctor who presses down on a swollen area and asks if that action hurts becomes one of the factors that is providing your private experience of pain without feeling pain his- or herself.  The problem the patient has is in expressing his pain to an audience that is distinct from his experience of pain, even as this audience is one of this pain's definers.  The problem the black individual has, as a parellel, is in expressing his private self to an audience that believes itself to be distinct from his private self, even though this audience is one of this self's definers.  It becomes necessary, then, to have a double consciousness -- the patient has to be somewhat aware of his own pain and the way the doctor views the patient in order to make the hospital visit effective.  The Negro American has to be aware of his own experience as a Negro and the way the doctor views the Negro in order to effectively operate in American society.

It's helpful to remember here that you need to reflect society somehow in order to act in society.  You have to have an identity in society in order to influence it.)

Now, I got a bit sidetracked when I realized that I said Louisa was defined by Bob and Tom – this sounded a bit sexist, to put it mildly.  So I changed the “social definition” part of the equation to “private self” – even though social definition and the private self are one and the same (see previous parenthesis if you don’t see why).  This was so that I could add that Louisa was motivated by her private self.  But although this might be the case, her private self was formed, to a major extent, by its connection to Bob and Tom.  And Bob and Tom’s private selves were formed by their connection to Louisa and their peers (who also are the audiences that judge Bob and Tom's public selves).  It would appear that no individual has the power to exist outside of another's definition.

Which brings us to the question of who, exactly, is at the top of the food chain.  Who has the power of definition here?  Louisa, Bob, Tom, or other individuals in society?

The answer in today’s literary criticism is that there is no hard, firm answer.  One bias is to say that no one has power – power isn’t something that any individual possesses, but rather is simply a force that shapes people in society.  One example of this bias in action is belief that when you see oppression you should focus on trying to eliminate the type of power that enables that oppression, not the individual who is exercising that type of power.  A rebuttal to this bias is that it is something that people who exercise power can hide behind – it excuses them to exercise power unjustly without taking responsibility for it, and in effect allows them to say “It’s not me – it’s the power outside of me that is doing xyz.”  A practical example of how this rejection of power could be seen as problemetic is in the defenses given at the Nazi trials – the Nazis working in the concentration camps stated they weren’t guilty because they were under the influence of a larger system of power – they didn’t possess the power themselves.

When we look at this story through W.E.B. DuBois’ rather influential glasses of double-consciousness, it appears that Louisa’s Negro/private self is connected to Tom and her White/Public self is connected to Bob.  She is defined by both men and, through her, both men are compared to each other.  Louisa brings them together – she is an agent of W.E.B. DuBois’ double consciousness in that she is able to see the benefit that both the Negro and the American “White” self bring to the table.  Both collaborate in defining Louisa, and Louisa reflects definition back to them – just as the Negro and White American living in the United States, according to DuBois, are supposed to collaborate in America in order to define her.  The hope is that this will be a two way process, and that America (whose principles year to do this, anyway) will reflect that definition of collaboration back.  America/Louisa becomes a common arena for Negroes/Tom and Whites/Bob to connect to– and indeed, the very nature of America/Louisa would desire that this connection take place.  But it does not at the end – both sides conflict and die.  The next question is:  what is the best way to process the sense of loss that results?

One way is to purge it and forget about it, and the another is to embrace it, wrestle with it, and eventually sink into it so that you can more thoroughly understand it.  The first way is often characterized as the Christian way of looking at the world, and the second as the Blues way.

Which brings us to the poem “The Weary Blues.”  As the man plays the blues, he identifies more and more with the sense of loss that Louisa felt at the end of “Blood-Burning Moon.”  At first he tries to purge this sense of loss in saying that “I’s going to quit my frowning/ and put my troubles on the shelf.”  But the problem there, if we look at things from a "blues" standpoint, is that this purging would result in loss, not power, because to dismiss something is to refuse to understand it, and you can only have power over that which you understand (according to the blues way of looking at the world).  And if you’ve read all of this, including this sentence, by the eighteenth of this month, send me an email or write something saying so, along with a comment on your impression of what you read, and you’ll get three more points on the next paper.  If you don't follow these instructions by group activity timing of our meeting on the eighteenth, these points will not be given.  Ignore this current sentence and the previous two if you’re trying to make sense of this paragraph.  So as the man playing the blues continues playing and realizes this principle, he increases his understanding by taking in the suffering rather than getting rid of it.  If knowledge is power, and success is most comprehended by those who never acquire it, then, if anyone is powerful, it is the man who embraces.  There is the prominent thought, voiced by Foucault, that it is not the person who has physical force or influence who has the power, but rather the person who most deeply understands the way the world works and can thus maneuver within it. 

Like the con artist who is able to jump in and out of roles to accomplish his ends – while his real “self” is dead or invisible to society -- the blues man’s definition is “like a rock or a man that’s dead,” and the power of society to define him or, in the words of J. Alfred Prufrock, "formulate [him] into a phrase" becomes as ineffective as the sun’s power to define a new moon.  In the understanding that comes from embracing his suffering, the man eventually finds freedom and, arguably, power.  In the poem, the blues man is finally able to access that “you” underneath the societal definition of the private self, and this knowledge is where is power comes from.  Whether or not this is the way things work in real life is another story, and I’m not saying I agree with this way of thinking – what I’m saying is that this practice of seeking understanding by embracing despair is a “blues” way of looking at the world. 

Hopefully the preceding discussion makes a bit clearer the desire for collaboration in “I, Too”, the desire to peacefully identify with the Negro/dark/private self and the American/white/public self in “Dream Variations”,  the tension of split consciousness between the personal sense of self and the outsider’s sense of one’s self in “Incident”, the struggle between the African and American self in “Africa”, the reason why the "Harlem Dancer" is pictured as alienated from her spectators, the importance of breaking down boundaries between different groups in “If I Must Die”, and so on.

This all brings us to “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi.  Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon.”

In this poem, we complicated things a bit.  The double-consciousness doesn’t just apply to Negro culture and American culture here.  The fundamental divide between the way you process your private role in society and output your public role in society is challenged.  Also challenged is society’s ability to give "you" (whatever that is) a coherent private self.

As Trinh Minh-Ha notes in her book When the Moon Waxes Red, just as the moon exists outside of the sun’s power to define it and our power to see it, so this “you” exists outside of society’s construction of your private self and your expression of this private self to society.   But in order to see that there is a "you" beyond the construction of the private and the expression of the public, we have to find parts of ourselves that don’t fit into these constructions or expressions.

According to “A Bronzeville Mother…,” there is, just underneath the surface of what we take in, and lying far behind the expression we give out, is another self, constantly working.  Something that is underneath our “adulthood.”   This is what the poem is talking about when it says that, underneath our adulthood, is an infant.  Our adulthood is something worn like clothing – it can help us function in society, but our real self, the poem clearly states, is underneath that.

“Perhaps the boy had never guessed/ that the trouble with grown-ups was that under the magnificent shell of adulthood, just under/ waited the baby full of tantrums” (lines 36-38).

(And yet, one could argue, even that is problematic, because the image of a “baby” is an image created by society of a private self, too…the excavation is even deeper than this.)

As Louisa witnessed tragedy take place between Tom and Bob, so the woman in the poem witnesses tragedy take place between the Fine Prince and the Dark Villain that fundamentally challenges the position of both.  Instead of rejecting this challenge, she enters into it – along with all of its tragedy – and comes out of the situation with a deeper knowledge of the situation.  And in that deep sorrow, she also is able to identify with the Bronzeville mother.  She may not have identified with this tragedy enough to “sleep like a rock or a man that’s dead,” but she has identified enough to begin seeing through society’s mechanisms for defining identity much more than she did before.   Through her inability to dismiss this tragedy, she comes closer to resolving the problem of double consciousness (the divide between the American and the Negro) by identifying with the sorrow (the "blues," if you will) of Emmett Till’s mother.

Is she more powerful than her husband at the end?

A few options:

No, if power comes from and is possessed by the individual who exerts the most external physical force.

It’s a non-question if power is a force that works on individuals but is not possessed by individuals, because then neither the wife or the husband would be possessing any power.

Yes, if power can be possessed by the individual so that understanding is power and ignorance is weakness.

Comments?  Questions?