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.
Nice post! Thank you for explaining this reference that I didn't know anything about. It's interesting to think about what 'pretending to be a doll' means for Macon. It could be that his aware of race activist self is a false persona that he gives up at the end of the book. But his complacent white self could also be the doll identity that he gives up and then returns to at the end of the book like the alternative ending of the play.
ReplyDeleteWow, great blog post! I had to look this up before (and didn't get very satisfying results), so thanks for highlighting what this means! I love the little references everywhere, and this is such an incredible and subtle little nudge that shows how Macon's self-view and attitudes towards race aren't as honest as they might seem. I'm still not quite sure how to interpret this "find herself" analogy - maybe Macon is also leaving to "find himself" and realize his whiteness, but there's something about that that makes me uncomfortable.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great explication of how Ibsen's _Doll's House_ might be reflecting on Macon's own character--a rare example of Mansbach using a non-black writer as a point of departure or source of allusion. Of course, a more basic way that this play functions in the novel is as a kind of punchline to a joke: Macon is first surprised that this big guy approaching him in the middle of the night in this sketchy park in Harlem is part of a community-theater troupe, and then he's doubly surprised that the all-black Harlem-based company is not producing a play by a black playwright: "We are not a monochromatic people!" This joke is built on later, when they agree to participate in the Day of Apology, but they refuse to do a scene from Amiri Baraka's Black Arts Movement play _Dutchman_, but instead insist on a little-known Euripides play about Agamemnon and Clytemnestra ("they refused to be pigeonholed"!).
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