Fair Women, Red Hands, Black Will(s): Domestic Tragedy's Racial Logic

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• Fair Women, Red Hands, Black Will(s): Domestic Tragedy’s Racial Logic
• Ariane M. Balizet (bio)

In Thomas Middleton’s 1608 A Yorkshire Tragedy, the protagonist—a profligate, ferocious householder known only as the “Husband”—is in a gambling-induced rage when his eldest son enters the room and attempts to spin a top at his feet. As the Husband grabs his son and threatens him with a knife, the child exclaims,

SON.

Oh, what will you do, father?—I am your white boy.

HUSBAND.

[Strikes him] Thou shalt be my red boy. Take that! (4.98–9)

“White boy,” as many editors note, was a relatively common term of endearment in the Renaissance for a darling or beloved child. In Henry Porter’s 1599 Two Angry Women of Abington, a young woman expresses her romantic interest in a neighbor by asking, “Whose white boy is that same? Know ye his mother?” (8.76). In Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, Mistress Merrythought addresses her son Michael: “What says my white boy?” (2.87). The clownish Bergetto, in John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, boasts of the fortune he is sure to inherit at his uncle’s death: “I am his white boy,” he says, “and will not be gulled” (1.3.82–83). In these latter and less violent examples, the phrase “white boy” connotes affection and familiarity by way of affirming the value of lineage; these boys are made White when claimed by familial relations or designated a worthy heir.

Scholars and editors have registered the use of “white boy” as a marker of innocence and pride without acknowledging, however, how these qualities naturalize whiteness as the ideal against which the Husband’s unnatural actions are made visible. As the child cries for mercy, his father insists that infanticide is an act of charitable protection from loss of wealth and status:

SON.

Oh, you hurt me, father.

HUSBAND.

My eldest beggar, thou shalt not live to ask an usurer bread, to cry at a great man’s gate, or follow ‘Good your Honour’ by a couch. No, nor your brother; ’tis charity to brain [End Page 41] you.

SON.

How shall I learn now my head’s broke?

HUSBAND.

(Stabs him) Bleed, bleed, rather than beg, beg! (4.102–07)

Whiteness, in this scene, comprises not only the privileges of familial affection—including the child’s purported innocence and the unquestioned paternity that the father should protect—but also a domestic identity based on racial logics of lineage, purity, and property. These racial logics are rarely acknowledged as such in studies of early modern domestic tragedy, an omission that perpetuates the notion that racial dynamics are not salient within the domain of early modern domesticity or, analogously, within the domestic concerns of sixteenth and seventeenth century England. This notion implies that race is a category carried in the bodies of Black and Brown “others” instead of a process engineered by colonial ambition and continually produced and negotiated by subjects of colonial powers. For Ian Smith,

The failure among critics to routinely remark whiteness as a fully realized racial category in all white plays—that is, where all the characters are presumed to be white unless otherwise noted—enables the normative invisibility of whiteness, which is a sign of its hegemony.

(107)

While it is almost certain that the Yorkshire Husband, Wife, and Sons are all White, the “normative invisibility” of this whiteness conceals the violent conflict over racial privilege fundamental to the genre of domestic tragedy.

Whiteness is, in fact, hyper-visible in the white boy/red boy exchange, although centuries of hegemonic scholarly and pedagogical practice have encouraged us to retain bright lines between whiteness as a racial category and its other associations with goodness, purity, and innocence. Because the genre of domestic tragedy focuses primarily on the private affairs of middle-class families with deep ancestral ties to a region or city in England, the racial dynamics in plays like A Yorkshire Tragedy have been largely overlooked, and considerations of race reserved for plays that feature characters whose racialization is primarily associated with foreign locales. Too often, Kim F. Hall has...