To be honest, Angry Black White
Boy has not been my favorite, out of the novels we have read this semester.
I dislike Macon as a supposedly heroic character and as an antagonistic
protagonist. Nonetheless, for the purpose of this blog post, I dug around in my
brain and found a single intriguing part of the novel to discuss. In the novel,
Macon is forced one night to play Nora in a production of Henrik Ibsen’s A
Doll’s House.
This little tidbit of information
caught my eye because, in my U of I class on Scandinavian History and Culture
this past semester, I read, discussed, and analyzed the play with my
classmates. It was an interesting read and led to some testy discussions. In
the play, Nora Helmer, the main character is a middle-aged housewife who
basically pretends to be a perfect wife in front of her husband, while sneaking
sweets behind his back and slowly paying off a loan she (illegally) took out
previously. The story goes that Nora, after being blackmailed by the worker in
the bank who gave her the loan, admits to her husband what she has done and
ends up leaving him and their children to go and find herself. Her explanation
is that she has always been a doll, pretending to be a doll for her father
before getting married and then for her husband after marriage. When she leaves
her children and husband, she is giving herself an opportunity to not have to
pretend and to discover herself. This ending was actually rather controversial
and in at least one country, they refused to put on the play unless Ibsen gave
them an alternate ending where Nora returned to her family.
Anyway, there is quite a bit of
hidden meaning in Mansbach’s choice to cast Macon as Nora in the production of A
Doll’s House. It implies that Macon has been pretending his whole life and
acting as a doll for the communities he wishes to be involved with. And, as
Nora leaves her family to find herself, Macon abandons his cause to rescind
back into his expected position as a white guy in society. And, the added
aspect of Macon being killed for supposedly not having abandoned his cause
represents Nora’s alternative storyline where she loses herself once more and
returns to her family and life as a doll in her own life-sized dollhouse.
