Musing, colorism and romance
Nov 25, 2023
Last year (2022) ACMRS Press published the only book where Margo Hendricks is the sole author of an academic tome, Race and Romance: Coloring the Past (sorry folks, Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period was co-edited by the illustrious Patricia Parker and me). Race and Romance had its genesis in, oddly enough, a deep interest in the racial identity/genealogy of one Aphra Behn. The book became something more even though I continued pondering about Behn. However, it should be noted Race and Romance came to maturity when I started to publish romance fiction and discovered not just the inherent racism underlying the romance publishing industry but also the colorism the industry promotes. Thus, dear reader, this musing may be a bit longer than most and I pray you indulge my whimsical reflections.
A word, if I may, on colorism
early 13c., "skin color, complexion," from Anglo-French culur, coulour, Old French color "color, complexion, appearance" (Modern French couleur), from Latin color "color of the skin; color in general, hue; appearance (https://www.etymonline.com)
The obsession with the color of a person’s skin, as I sought to make obvious in my book, started centuries ago and persists with equal fervor even now. Of course, in graduate school and beyond I’ve been in search of the “why.” I am a why person, not a who or a what or a how—although occasionally when will poke it’s head through the clouds of thoughts and redirect, albeit momentarily, my attention. As Kim F. Hall has brilliantly shown in a must read academic book, Things of Darkness, colorism is inescapably at play in premodern/early modern literature. Physical descriptions devolve to color—whether its skin, eyes, or hair. The skin spectrum is multilayered—white to tan to brown to black—while the metaphoric language is simple, fair and dark. Oral and written (literary) usage is how colorism, and its attendant metaphors, become inscribed in human social consciousness and imprinted upon our flesh.
Historical romance and colorism
An old-fashioned saying but pertinent—I cut my eye tooth on Margaret Irwin’s historical fiction about the Tudors and Stuarts (adolescent), which of course sent me down the historical and literary rabbit hole where I eventually set up academic shop (adulthood). Beatrice Small and Dorothy Dunnett fed my romance thirst, and then I met Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Wolf and the Dove. Done for. Historical romance became my catnip.
Unlike most white romance readers, as a Black child, teenager, and adult woman, I’ve had no problems reading representations of whiteness, of white femininity and beauty, of white masculinity based on class, and a white world devoid of non-Europeans except when they appeared as enslaved or savages or ‘oriental’. To my mind, what I read was white-based fiction even when set in historical moments of interaction with peoples from Africa, the Americas, and Asia. When I wanted to read about American Black people, their communities, and their lives, I knew where to go. Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Pauline Hopkins were early introductions into Black romance originating within Black communities, families, and love. No matter the racist and sexist obstacles.
What I hadn’t considered (or perhaps didn’t have the intellectual framework to consider) until writing Race and Romance was the burden of colorism at work in the white-authored contemporary historical romances I’ve read and continue to read. Additionally, I hadn’t given much thought to how few white readers or romance scholars speak to the matter of white colorism. It’s not that whiteness goes unnoticed (it is very much a noticeable commodity, especially if you’re a non-white reader), it’s the nuances of whiteness that surface when “black,” “brown,” “red” or “yellow” bodies aren’t in play as contrasting metaphors. This is especially evident in representations of class and nation even in present day historical romance fiction.
Yes, dear reader, colorism is as intrinsic to whiteness as it is to white versus non-white paradigms (black/white, brown/white, red/white, and yellow/white). I’ll save a discussion of those paradigms, and all their permutations, for another day. This musing is about establishing white privilege and white dis-privilege within whiteness in historical romance.
Not white yet white
I am a recidivist reader of Lisa Kleypas’ historical romances and, in my opinion, no one handles the trope of whiteness as well as Kleypas. What do you mean, MargoH, by the “trope of whiteness?” Do let me explain.
A recent romance genre trend is treating tropes as more action terms (close proximity, enemies to lovers, grumpy/sunshine etc) and less as figurative language. A trope, like its sisters metaphor, simile, and symbol, functions as and sustains evocative imagery in fictional writing. For example, Edmund Spenser titles the third book of The Faerie Queen, “The Legend of Britomart, or Of Chastity.” Britomart (like her predecessors Bradamante in Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso, and Clorinda in Gerusalem Liberata) is Spenser’s trope of chastity with mad warrior skills and protective armor. In early modern discourse chastity moves on a spectrum and Spenser’s Britomart, as a trope of chastity, is the privileged figuration to illustrate the distance from chastity others have fallen (Spenser, not me. I’m all for the unchaste tbh).
What does all this have to do with my declaration of whiteness as a trope you may well ponder? Like chastity, whiteness operates on a spectrum but we human beings are trained not to see it because our focus is redirected to the non-white (particularly blackness) that is oppositional. To reflect on the spectrum of colorism within whiteness, we have to peel back its layers (pardon the pun) and contemporary historical romances written by white authors are good place to begin. And, because, Lisa Kleypas started me thinking about this issue several years ago…
Whiteness has to be colorized
The first time I truly noticed the color spectrum of whiteness in a Kleypas historical romance was in the description of Derek Craven in Dreaming of You. Despite being English-born, London-born, Derek was cast as an outsider to the ‘white aristocratic community” he fleeced of their wealth. Leaving aside the class dimension, Kleypas’ description of Derek’s skin (when her female main character Sara Fielding sees his naked chest) is color-coded to insure his color distance from acceptable whiteness is always present: “Coppery smears of blood covered his swarthy skin.”
"dark-colored, tawny," especially in reference to skin, 1580s, an unexplained alteration of swarty (1570s), from swart + -y (2). Related: Swarthiness. A swarthness is attested from 1520s.
As someone accustomed to seeing the term swarthy applied to African and Middle Eastern peoples, especially those with dark brown skin, in early modern English cultural discourse, I must admit the lexical shift is intriguing. Before folks jump in my comments, there’s a difference between “tawny” and “tan” although both reference non-white skin color, specifically brown. Swarthy is of a different order however.
Other appearances of swarthy in Kleypas romances occur in descriptions of two Romani men:
Mine Till Midnight: Description of Cam Rohan (“He was black-haired and swarthy and exotic.” Description of Amelia Hathaway: (She was fair skinned and dark haired, of medium height, with the rosy-cheeked wholesomeness common to the Hathaways.”)
Seduce Me At Sunrise: “Merripen (Kev Rohan) didn’t move. Color had risen in his swarthy face.” (Chapter 1) Also, chapter 1: “they couldn’t have been more opposite, the pale blond invalid [Win Hathaway] and the huge Rom (Kev Merripen]. One so refined and otherworldly, the other brown and rough-hewn and barely civilized.”
Kleypas’ Marrying Winterborne takes a different turn with colorism. She uses the word swarthy in Rhys Winterborne’s self-description: “ Despite his great fortune, Rhys didn’t have the deportment or education of a gentleman. Nor did he have the appearance of one, with his swarthy complexion and black hair, and workingman’s brawn.” (Chapter 1).
When Helene Ravenel muses over Rhys’ skin color, she takes swarthy to its next level of coloration: “His skin was not fashionably pale but a rich, glowing umber, and his hair was quite black.”(Chapter 2)
brown earthy pigment, 1560s, from French ombre (in terre d'ombre), or Italian ombra (in terra di ombra), both from Latin umbra "shade, shadow" (see umbrage) or else from Umbra, fem. of Umber "belonging to Umbria," region in central Italy from which the coloring matter first came (compare Sienna). Burnt umber, specially prepared and redder in color, is attested from c. 1650, distinguished from raw umber.
Despite their whiteness, these men are are figuratively not white.
White v white
What is striking about these novels, white colorism seems to only apply to men who are the “wrong” economic class or nation. In fact, what appeals to me about Kleypas’ novels is her engagement with nineteenth-century English class conflict. Her “heroes” are self-made wealthy men who are on the periphery of aristocracy but never fully part of it, usually by choice yet willing to accept an adjacent relationship. Yet the women these heroes marry possess aristocratic lineage (an exception seems to be Sara Fielding in Dreaming of You), perhaps extending the favor of their whiteness to their husbands.
In these romances, the tensions may be class-based but the narratives play heavily on establishing inescapable color differences among white folk. Cam and Kev Rohan are Romani/Irish and therefore not the “right kind” of whiteness. So too is Derek Craven because of birth, a London sex worker’s abandoned child. Winterborne is Welsh. All white, all wealthy, and none are initially acceptable within whiteness. In other words, even within whiteness there is a hierarchy of the color.
Now before folk get testy fabout my singling out Kleypas’ romances, re-read the first few words of the paragraph. I truly am a Kleypas fan. However, that doesn’t mean the academic who works on race, racism, colorism, and class is asleep. When you re-read a book multiple times, you notice things and the academic in me first noticed the problematic depictions in Mine Till Midnight and the troubling representation of Romani people, and the way Cam and Kev’s aristocratic “lineage, albeit Irish, fostered an acceptability within whiteness that is forever denied to their Romani “swarthiness.” Margo Hendricks saw the way Dreaming of You and Marrying Winterborne deliver a familiar narrative of impoverished whiteness that can’t be overcome no matter the wealth.
Musing on white colorism
White colorism goes about its business in societies unnoticed until the ostrich lifts its head.
Since the so-called enlightenment, white supremacy insists that colorism’s oppositional framework is simplistic: black/white, brown/white/, yellow/white, and red/white, and uncomplicated. If only that were true, it would be easier to eliminate both white supremacy and its systemic hold on our imaginations. For non-white people, we pay attention to the external struggle for a definitive whiteness but rarely note excludes other whiteness. We witness longstanding historical and contemporary struggles between nations (Russia/Ukraine for a recent example) and rarely color it as a continual sorting out of whiteness and who belongs.
If white folk were truly equally white why the “ethnic” conflicts (Scots/English, English/Welsh, English/Irish, Russia/Ukraine, France/Germany and so on) that have taken place over the centuries? From where I sit, I see only white people behaving badly over who has “white” supremacy. Of course, I’m not saying that people classified as “having color” (as opposed to “white people”) aren’t tangled up in whiteness’ tentacles. Au contraire dear reader. As I argued in Race and Romance: Coloring the Past and hopefully illustrated in Elizabethan Mischief, it is the inability to regulate “whiteness” that is the problem of whiteness.
Thanks for reading. If you’re enjoying MargoH’s Musings, please support with a paid subscription if you can afford to do so. Or, buy Elysabeth Grace’s romance novels directly from her website, www.elysabethgrace.com, or from her store on www.payhip.com/ElysabethGrace.
Finally, if you use my musings in any capacity that ends up in print, digitally, or on a podcast, please cite this Black woman.
From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free, and only then will we all be free.
MargoH
© 2024 Margo Hendricks
