July 1903 (Vol. 6, No. 7)
Source: James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
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Commentary
Grace McGowan
Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Colby College
The July 1903 issue of the Colored American Magazine, like many issues, opens with a slew of advertisements for everything from books to wagons, keys to laundry detergent, and especially early-twentieth-century cosmetics. This issue is particularly concerned with two intertwined themes: the politics and tensions of early-twentieth-century beauty and the reimagining or reclaiming of a classical tradition from Ancient Greece and Rome by and for Black people.
A cosmetic advertisement for “A Wonderful Face Bleach and Hair Straightener” appears here and repeatedly in issues of the magazine. It uses a standard of cosmetics marketing by including two line drawings of women labeled “Before” and “After.” The “Before” represents a woman with a dark complexion, indicated by the cross-hatching in black on the skin, and with curly hair closely surrounding her head. The “After” includes no hatching of any kind on the skin of the face, leaving it the color of the magazine paper, and the hair is represented as being long, sleek, and smooth, drawn into a bun at the back of the head. Although the labeling of “Before” and “After” indicates the reader should interpret this as the same woman, the transformation promised by the product is extreme, suggesting that visual signifiers of Blackness will be eliminated. It is emphasized that to be “perfectly white” is the ultimate goal and perfection is achieved by removing all perceived imperfections, blemishes and, tellingly, Blackness. The desirability of whiteness, the association with features racialized as white with beauty, and the denigration of Black women’s physical appearance are a fraught ground upon which this issue performs a complicated intertextual debate within its pages. The advertisement, by appearing before any creative content in the magazine, establishes a context in which white skin and straight hair are the apex of feminine beauty and desirability thus setting the terms of the debate around white supremacist beauty ideals.
This issue also includes an installment of Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood in which Reuel is taken to see Queen Candace at her palace. The episode coalesces around ideas of beauty, centered upon the Queen and her virginal attendants. Hopkins portrays the women in the palace as exquisitely beautiful, focalized through Reuel’s romanticized gaze: “[n]ever had Reuel beheld such subtle grace of form and feature, such masses of coal-black hair, such melting eyes of midnight hue. Each girl might have posed for a statue of Venus” (494/5). Hopkins refutes the cosmetic advertisements that appear early in the issue, and celebrates the beauty of the Black African women in the Queen’s palace. However, it is done through Reuel’s Westernized gaze, a gaze that compares them to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and fertility. Hopkins builds a political argument about beauty, femininity, and desirability by rewriting the classical roots of the goddess Venus and representing these women as the muses for such sculptures.
Candace’s connection with Venus is emphasized through Reuel’s internal dialogue: “[y]es; she was a Venus, a superb statue of bronze, moulded by a great sculptor; but an animated statue, in which one saw the blood circulate, and from which life flowed” (495). Candace is characterized as a statue come to life, a Galatea figure, made totally perfect for the man of her destiny. In the Ovidian myth, Pygmalion, disgusted by his perceptions of the many flaws of mortal women, carves a statue from marble and falls in love with it, and the statue is then brought to life by Venus. In Queen Candace’s case, she is objectified by Reuel, associated with bronze instead of marble, and Hopkins rewrites the pristine whiteness of classical and neoclassical statuary to characterize the queen as a “Venus worked in bronze.” At the same time, she is represented as animated, moving this representation away from mere objectification. Her objectification is subverted through the “blood” that circulates in her veins and flows in her, as a potent symbol of regal lineage, family, legacy, and inheritance, as well as of her vivacity and life. In this description Candace is poised between being objectified by Reuel’s gaze and being brought to life in an Ovidian transformation.
The physical description of Candace oscillates between a romantic stock portrait and the revision of beauty ideals for Black women. The “jet-black hair,” “warm bronze complexion,” “thick black eyebrows,” and “great black eyes”(495) all speak to the twinned beauty and darkness that are inherent in the queen’s features. However, the “delicate nose” and “lips red as a rose” (495) suggest a more stock description of beauty. The veneration of long hair is also in keeping with white beauty norms. The queen is characterized, however, not just by her beauty but by the “power” that can be sensed lurking beneath. The warm, brown, and shining tone of the bronze reflects the skin tone of the queen and also signifies luxury and wealth. This description of the queen hovers somewhere between a radical revision of the Eurocentric white beauty ideals and the belief that proximate whiteness denotes beauty.
Finally, the queen’s chastity and virginity are stressed to move her beauty away from stereotypes of hypersexuality: “Her loveliness was absolutely and ideally perfect. Her attitude of unstudied grace accorded well with the seriousness of her face; she seemed the embodiment of all chastity” (495). Candace closely resembles an Ovidian Galatea figure as she exists as “absolutely and ideally perfect,” an “ideal” of woman, blurring the boundary between objectification and her subjecthood. Despite the insistence on her chastity, Candace is also the picture of fertility. She is a space from which “life flowed” (495). Hopkins’s representation of Candace makes radical claims on the classical figure of Venus which have reverberating influence throughout the twentieth century as the beauty and cosmetics industries begin to change and boom and as American beauty ideals shift.
Table of Contents
Mrs. Hattie M. Hicks, Chicago, Ill. [Cover]
Touissant L’Ouverture (Frontispiece)
Madeira, Nicholas H. Campbell, U. S. N.
Ethiopians of the Twentieth Century, A. Kirkland Soga
Touisssant L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass
Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (serial) [Part VII, Chs. 16 (concluded)-18], Pauline E. Hopkins
Rights of the Negro, Charles B. Noyes
Noted Business Women of Chicago, Mrs. Alberta Moore-Smith
The Perfect Day (Poem)
Life and Works of Negroes Distinguished in Earlier Centuries in Science, Literature and the Arts, II. Gustavus Vassa, Bishop H. Gregoire
Lead by Thy Life (Poem), Clifford E. Jones
How the Steamer “Planter” Ran Away, Eva B. Allensworth
William Pickens, J. Shirley Shadrach (pseud. Pauline E. Hopkins)
Here and There
The Eighth Atlanta Negro Conference
The Alabama Decision
For the Sake of Elijah, Edward Elmore Brock
Editorial and Publishers’ Announcements