An Examination of the Relationship Between Race and Gender in an Early Twentieth Century Drama: A Study of Angelina Weld Grimké's Play Rachel

Abstract

Women playwrights before 1950 were full partners in theatre's protest against conditions for Blacks, whether in form of propaganda, folks plays or historical dramas. They also made unique perspective of Black women's reality a part of that protest. Not until mid-century, however, would their voices reach beyond their communities into highly competitive world of professional theatre.(1) Today when we think of black women playwrights names that come to mind are Ntozake Shange, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Adrienne Kennedy. The endeavors and inroads that these women have made and continue to make in drama could not have occurred without struggle and ground breaking works of early black women playwrights such as Angelina Weld Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, Mary Burill, Myrtle Smith Livingston, Ruth Gaines-Shelton, Eulalie Spence, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marita Bonner. These black women playwrights, and several others, published over sixty plays and pageants in addition to writing several unpublished texts.(2) Yet, despite these achievements, black female playwrights of first half of twentieth century have often been overlooked and pushed aside regardless of their contributions to American and black theater. Extreme racial and gender oppression best explains why black female playwright was not recognized prior to 1950. Forces of racism and sexism erected barriers so that blacks, overall, could not achieve any significant status in American drama, and for black women playwriting as a profession was considered a male vocation.(3) Women, on other hand, were encouraged to pursue more acceptable, feminine genres such as poetry or fiction.(4) Being both black and female, therefore, limited black woman's progress as a playwright. Consequently, due to racial and gender barriers, work of black female playwrights was slow to emerge. Prior to Lorraine Hansberry's production of A Raisin in Sun on Broadway in 1959, black women dramatists were slow to evolve because of their limited access to staging their works and because of stereotypes they had to combat. Like their male counterparts, early black female playwrights were writing against stereotypical portrayals of blacks on stage by white playwrights. Commonly for black men, stereotypical images were those of comic buffoon, lazy shiftless Uncle Tom, and savage brute, while for black women there were sexless domineering mammy types, loose trolops, and tragic mulattoes. White-authored productions, such as minstrel shows, helped to enforce these distorted images of black people because they were most popular form of theater in America for nearly a century.(5) Moreover, even when white playwrights attempted to celebrate Negro, their endeavors only ended in reinscribing existing stereotypes. For example, white playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, William Vaughn Moody, Marc Connelly, and Paul Green, all, at some point, used as their subject matter in an attempt to valorize black people. However, these well-intentioned white representations of black life and black people in drama did no more than reinforce stereotypes already fixed about blacks. Whether savage brute image changed to noble savage in Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones or if Negro themes were expressed in Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom, the work of many white playwrights did not address experiences of Blacks in any serious way.(6) For this reason, it became important for both black female and male playwrights to re-create or re-invent reality in their plays in order to demystify white stereotypes of blacks. It was work of black women dramatists, however, which captured lives of black people as no white or black male playwright could.(7) They created a reality that brought in dynamic of gender in addition to focus on race in their works. …