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Her name, that was as fresh
As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black
As mine own face. - William Shakespeare, Othello1
Nineteenth-century Americans were fascinated with Othello and with producing racialized performances of blackness; Othello was most often performed by white actors in some form of blackface.2 Since blackface makeup was transferable, these performances also illustrated racist anxieties about interracial coupling. Audience accounts convey that by the end of the play Othello's "blacking" had inevitably rubbed off onto the "white" Desdemona. William Winter, for example, recounts Junius Brutus Booth's Othello: "on one occasion, having no black stockings, he blackened his legs as well as his face and hands, and thereby, in the course of the performance, soiled the white dress of the fair Desdemona."3 Another review notes blacking makeup's "many disadvantages: particularly in coming off inconveniently and being transferable from hand to hand; oftentimes they were seen to touch nothing they did not soil; let it be Desdemona 's dress or even her cheek."4 English actor Ellen Terry complains that Henry Irving, playing Othello to Terry's Desdemona in 1881, left her "as black as he."5
The fact that Desdemona could become-quite literally-"begrimed and black" is more than a curiosity of this medium of performance. Begrimed and blackface Desdemonas are testaments to complex theorizations of race and the non-normative genealogies by which race was imagined to be transferred. Nineteenth-century minstrel performances theorized race, presenting ideas about what race was and how it worked. These ideas were influenced by historical racial discourses to which minstrelsy also contributed. Performances of Othello illustrate a theory of racial formation, according to which blackness might be transferred from black men to white women, resulting in white women's re-racialization. Simply put, the "begrimed" Desdemona literalizes white racist anxieties about interracial sex. As Abigail Adams recalls in 1785, "my whole soul shuderd [sic] when ever I saw the sooty More [sic] touch fair Desdemona."6 What about this "sooty" touch was perceived to threaten white womanhood? This image of Desdemona "begrimed" illustrates how nineteenth-century American beliefs about interracial sex came to bear on understandings of white womanhood. Desdemona's whiteness is not permanent in this understanding; in these plays we see how she might become black herself as a result of interracial sexuality.
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