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Toni MorrisonPlaying in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
White Forms and Dark Shadows
Morrison notes the prevalence of white forms in American literature, including at the conclusion of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and in other stories. She writes that these white forms occur after the characters have gone through some form of blackness, and the forms are all-encompassing and impenetrable in nature. They also involve the death or impotence of black characters.
Morrison believes that these white forms represent a kind of commentary on the shadowy dark presence that is also present in many of these American stories. The whiteness of the forms is enhanced by the contrast of the shadows that surround it. The shadows or dark presences are often dispelled before the white forms can emerge in greater power and potency.
Morrison states the shadowy presence, the Africanist presence in literature, is used to shore up and strengthen the white forms. Similarly, whites in literature are represented as more powerful, free, and virile in contrast with black characters. American literature often involves a symbolic strengthening of this whiteness after it dispels the shadows that surround it, just as whites in early America were surrounded by blacks in slavery.
“Nurse Shark”
In Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, Harry, a white character, describes a black woman as “a nurse shark” (85). This odd phrase symbolizes black women as something other than human and something that is inherently paradoxical—a person who ministers to others while also wanting to kill them.
Morrison writes that Hemingway’s ideas of women are caught up in the symbol of a nurse. Many of his female characters are either nurses or like nurses, as they minister to the men around them. However, they are also capable of suffocating and killing the men around them.
Some of the black characters in Hemingway’s novels are also nurse-like in their willingness to serve, but they also at times express anger and violence. For example, the black character in To Have and Have Not, Wesley, tells Harry, the white character, that he is inhumane. Therefore, the nurse shark expresses the contradictions of the Africanist presence in Hemingway’s mind as someone who is both servile and ungrateful.
Africanist Idiom
Morrison analyzes the way in which African dialogue is rendered in American literature. She writes that the Africanist idiom is often made to seem alien, and it is reproduced by white writers in ways that makes African-American speech almost unintelligible.
The Africanist idiom is symbolic of the way in which the black character is made to seem like the other, one who is alien. It is also symbolic of the speechlessness and powerlessness of blacks and the relative power and privilege of whites. The Africanist idiom also carries the connotation of forbidden sexuality and modernism. It became a way for whites to express their hipness and sophistication in more modern times.
The Africanist idiom is a coded way in which white writers establish white power and freedom and render black characters speechless, unintelligible, and even foreign. It is a means by which white writers convey the class and race hierarchy in their texts.
Related Titles
By Toni Morrison
