"One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"
-W.E.B. DuBois "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)
I was reminded of this topic in class on Thursday when we read and analyzed Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear The Mask." Most of the class, including myself, concluded that the poem was about the duality of the African-American experience. Having their own culture, but assimilating to white culture when around white people in public. I believe it was Martin that put forth the suggestion that this poem could be about women. Professor Cassel didn't seem all that convinced and we moved on.
However, I feel that Martin had a great point. It could be about women. In fact, the that is why the DuBois quote above, which is very much like the Dunbar poem, has always appealed to me: It is a universal experience. DuBois has zero ambiguity in his writings, making it clear that he is speaking of the African-American experience, but it still works for all sorts of experiences.
As an example, when I was writing a paper on Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel "Persepolis" for my Women in Religion class last fall, I began noticing how DuBois' quote applied to this story of a Persian woman living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Other side of the world, around seven decades after DuBois wrote "The Souls of Black Folk", but it still applied. Satrapi loves her home country of Iran, but could not reconcile this love with the oppressive religious regime, especially the misogyny of that regime. Satrapi knew her twoness. Not African and American, but Iranian and liberated woman. It turns out that this concept is within all of us. If you don't think so, next time you see your grandmother, tell her in detail how you feel about your first sexual experience.
Sociologists even have terms for this. "Front-stage self" and "Backstage self." We act differently in public as we do at home. We talk differently to our sweet Aunt Betty than we do when we've had a few drinks with our friends. We all wear masks.
So, what does all of this have to do with "Death of the Author"? Well, all of this begins to illustrate why we don't have to take into consideration authorial intent. We can ignore it completely. We can put our fingers in our ears at the moment that somebody starts discussing "historical context." Or as the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text."
I'll explain this all in more depth in my next thrilling installment. I'm being facetious because only the biggest philosophy/literature nerds on earth could possibly care about this sort of crap, but hey...I promise that my next post will feature a gay Abraham Lincoln. That's fun, right?
