White Masculinity at the Turn of Two Centuries: The Narrative Enactment of an Ideal in Karoline Fischer’s “William der Neger” (1817) and Hans Grimm’s “Dina” (1913)

Abstract

White Masculinity at the Turn of Two Centuries: The Narrative Enactment of an Ideal in Karoline Fischer’s “William der Neger” (1817) and Hans Grimm’s “Dina” (1913) Birgit Tautz Masculinity and whiteness are first and foremost historical concepts. They simultaneously present an initial moment and a lasting effect of Western modernity. Discursively constructed, these concepts bear the hidden traces of experience and reality: numerous referents point to the experiential context in which they first arise, to the instances of perception that define them. But only texts – and the images of masculinity and whiteness they contain – provide access to these moments in history. Thus, the narrative construction of such images in German fiction allows us to capture the role of masculinity and whiteness in a particular national context. Fiction enables us to trace thresholds, substantial transformations in representing knowledge and ideals, rather than the neat, teleological progression towards the seemingly transhistorical categories of “masculinity” and “whiteness” at our disposal today. Accordingly, this article’s readings of Karoline Fischer’s story “William der Neger” (1817) and Hans Grimm’s novella “Dina” (1913) will expose the discursive transformations that distinguish human perception and its fictional representation at the turn of the twentieth century (1900) from the preceding one (1800) and that produce corresponding nuances of white masculinity. For although both narratives appear to emphasize the construction of blackness – and clearly enact racism by subjugating a non-Western, black “other” – they reveal a hidden dimension. The texts are preoccupied with whiteness and masculinity, “unnamed” elements that constitute the pieces’ structural centre. In focussing on hidden aspects of narrative structure, this article sheds new light on important studies of the discursive alignments between gender and race. These studies assert intersections, parallels, and hierarchical relationships between categories of gender and race, claiming that “women” is to “men” what “blackness” is to “whiteness” and deriving a structurally subordinate position of women and blackness, respectively (e.g. Connell 75). At their core, these arguments presume, as Imke Lode shows, a conflation of body and nature in Enlightenment discourse (208). Historical knowledge about the body [End Page 21] is certainly of interest here. Lode demonstrates the coevality in the emergence of racial and gender categories in the eighteenth century (211–14; cf. also Honegger; Schiebinger), whereas Sander Gilman claims that, in the nineteenth century, the black female represented white men’s fear of both blackness and femininity (99). Other studies detail the suppression of racial hierarchies in order to maintain the centrality of the male gender in envisioning historical progress (Weigel 189; Zantop 160), while still others demonstrate the masking of one category with another, as texts disguise gender conflicts as racial conflicts (Lennox 68; cf. also Gilman; Seshadri-Crooks 93). The present argument advances these insights by illustrating how parallel constructions, hierarchies, and disguises came about. It isolates the discursive inception of categories, so to speak. On one hand, the article defines visuality as a primary mode in the construction and representation of race around 1800 and illustrates how gender attributes are relegated to the background in the moment of visual perception and representation of blackness and whiteness. On the other hand, this article examines “the travel of masculinity” around 1900. The latter term refers, in a most literal sense, to the male subjects’ moving across the globe as well as to the conceptually porous nature of masculinity, femininity, whiteness, and blackness in relation to each other. Research on masculinity perceives its subject to be a modern category. That concept emerged in the historical and sociological framework of European modernity, whose beginnings the present argument locates in the long eighteenth century (Mosse 7; cf. Gray; Hull). Indeed, masculinity’s psychological-behavioural, biological, and sexual, sociological, and discursive manifestations reflect modern ways of life and thought and their underlying patterns of bourgeois gender complementarity (e.g. Connell 68; Gray 1–3, 235–43; for a more complex account Hull 141–53). These patterns of complementarity have produced and sustained gender as a relational category. They have fostered ideas about norms and typical roles for women and men alike and reinforced notions of individuality and the conjugal family (Connell 21–25). Nevertheless, even such constructivist arguments invoke a material...