Blazon

Abstract: Between i640 and i66o, English colonists in Virginia developed a legal system of chattel slavery out of the English hierarchical class system of indentured servitude. Bondage became marked by distinctions of skin color defined by the condition of the mother. Kim F. Hall's important book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, traces the rhetorical preparation for that legal distinction in the conquest of a racialized dark lady enacted in travel narratives, plays, and masques, but primarily in English lyric poetry. Hall grounds her analysis in two powerful and disparate strands of investigation: first, the historical analysis of the languages of race by Winthrop D. Jordan in White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550o-182 (Chapel Hill, i968) and, second, the feminist analysis of gender developed from Nancy Vickers's influential work on the dismemberment of the beloved implicit in the Petrarchan blazon ("'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York, I9851) and from Parker's own investigation of the rhetorical challenge of gender difference in New World texts (Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property [London, I9871). Hall situates herself as a black feminist reader confronting the canonical texts of European elite culture. She reads with scrupulous care and a full awareness of the consequences of figures of speech. She has two critical commonplaces to confront: the belief that the English were unfamiliar with African complexions and the belief that the black-white binarisms of Elizabethan poetry were not racialized categories. Hall's work on English elite investment in the slave trade powerfully challenges such narrow assertions. The familiarity and availability of tropes of race is clear in the figure of an enslaved black man in chains that the College of Heralds granted as an augmentation to John Hawkins's coat of arms after his second slave voyage in I562. Heraldic emblems are riddles to be deciphered; the reference to the racial characteristics of a African male body is simple. Hall also has the more delicate task of tracing the process of race in the language and definition of beauty in lyric poetry. The core of Hall's book is the argument over the lyric. She exposes the links between "blackness and economics in the English sonnet" (p. 66), primarily Sir Philip Sidney's. The dynamic of the poet's transformation of his dark lady into white is a mechanism that employs not simply neoplatonic love poetry but also "cultural values regarding the proper 'use' of foreign materia, both economic and discursive" (p. 71). Hall organizes the chapter around an analysis of four different tropes: the racialized light/dark dichotomy of the Elizabethan sonnet cycles, the colonialist nexus of beauty and cosmetics, the problems of sunburn with the implicit anxieties over climate embedded therein, and finally the binary of race in the Song of Songs.