Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature

Rebecca Aanerud

One of the signs of our times is that we really don't know what "white" is. —Kobena Mercer, in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video

In our society dominant discourse tries never to speak its own name. —Russell Ferguson, Out There: Marginality and Contemporary Art

Racializing Whiteness

The final lines of Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening unmistakably mark Edna as white: "The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water was chill, but she walked on. The water was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a long sweeping stroke." Yet despite this specificity of Edna's white subjectivity, little critical attention has been paid to her position as a white woman. Whiteness in the above passage is often understood to signal Edna's vulnerability, her innocence, even her purity associated with the rebirth to her true self. Certainly reading whiteness as such, although troublesome, is valid. I suggest, however, that whiteness has multiple meanings and significations, not the least of which is "race." In 1985 Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that "until the past decade or so ... race has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way," to which I would add that whiteness as race has yet to receive adequate critical consideration in the field of literary studies. It is not my intent to appropriate discussions of race in an effort to recenter white subjectivity. Rather, I want to call into question what white subjectivity is by contributing to the recent work of making visible the "constructed, and contested character of 'whiteness.'" Far too often, when race as a category of analysis is invoked, its meaning and significance are construed in terms of nonwhiteness. A classic example of this is illustrated in the following passage in which Teresa de Lauretis responds to a question concerning the absence of a racial component— despite the interracial relationship between the two main characters (Agatha, a black Latina Brazilian, and Jo, a white U.S. American)—in her analysis of the film She Must Be Seeing Things. "I thought a lot about the inscription of race in the relationship between Agatha and Jo, but I concluded that the film intentionally focuses on the other aspects of their relationship. And though it makes it clear that the role of Agatha is marked by her cultural difference as a Brazilian, a black Latina, it doesn't address the racial difference between the women. So it's not that race is not a crucial issue in lesbian and feminist relationships, politics, and theory. It certainly is. But it is not represented as an issue in this film." Race, in this quotation, is understood as racial difference located in the characters of color or in the dynamics between characters of differing racial backgrounds. It would seem that discussions of race are applicable only to those individuals, real or fictitious, who occupy a subject position other than white. Within such a scheme, being white is equated with being unraced—or, to stress the political, being normal.

In fact, all people live racialized lives. Jo's subjectivity is as racialized as Agatha's. As social beings we are each implicated in an interconnected series of hierarchical systems, of race, class, and gender among others. These systems are read onto our bodies, and we in turn interpret and are interpreted through our understandings and misunderstandings of them. Our awareness of these systems is partially informed by the degree of privilege or oppression we experience as a result of our positioning. While it might seem that race is something that affects only people of color, in fact race is a meaningful and fundamental factor in all lives. In film as well as literature race need not be an issue in order for it to be a relevant component. I am interested in expanding the theoretical discussions of race to include an examination of the constructions and representations of white subjectivity in literature. Relatedly, I wish to see how current power relations of gender, sexuality, race, and class are reproduced through the unspoken privilege of assuming racial neutrality.

This essay will take "whiteness" to be a socially and historically constructed category of racial identity. As such, whiteness cannot be understood as a singular entity, existing prior to or apart from other categories of identities. Its formation depends on the changing relations of gender, class, sexuality, and nationality. Thus, the meaning of whiteness, like all racialized identities in the United States, is not monolithic. Instead, its construction and interpretation are informed by historical moment, region, political climate, and racial identity.

As the epigraphs suggest, whiteness can be difficult to see. As Richard Dyer puts it, in a white supremacist nation, whiteness "secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular." This is not to suggest that representations of whiteness are similarly obscure to all "seers." In her article "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination," bell hooks argues that not only do many black authors (and her students of color) see whiteness clearly, they represent it in a way not seen in the works of white authors, namely, whiteness as terrorizing. I would add that one's ability to see whiteness is equally influenced by his or her relationship to white dominant society as a whole. In other words, the varying abilities to "see" whiteness are as much a result of consciousness as they are of race.

However, despite the "real" relations of readers of American fiction to that body of literature, all readers, to draw from Toni Morrison, "until very recently, and regardless of the race of the author, have been positioned as white." From this position, whiteness as race operates as an unmarked racial category. Unless told otherwise, the reader, positioned as white, assumes the characters are white. (Un)marked whiteness is, of course, a type of marking. In an analysis of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, Morrison writes that she easily identifies Eddy as white: "We know he is because nobody says so." Such (un)marked whiteness is often reinforced by the overt racial marking of the non-white characters.

Although the construction of whiteness depends on dynamic social, political, and historical factors, a predominant construction in American literature is undoubtedly whiteness as...