Anne Enright
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the
Age of Consent by Katherine Angel.
Verso, 147 pp., $19.95
One day Zeus and Hera were quarreling. They called Tiresias and asked him which of the two, man or woman, got the most pleasure from sex. Tiresias answered that if the pleasure were divided into ten parts, the woman enjoyed nine and the man only one.
—Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
The sex researcher Shere Hite, who died last fall, was brilliantly able to make an audience feel uncomfortable. She was a champion of the clitoris, a body part that seems to be rediscovered every few decades, along with the always unexpected news that vaginal penetration may be superfluous to women’s orgasmic, as opposed to reproductive or libidinal, interests. This potential autonomy is, in some cultures, so abhorrent that the clitoris is mutilated or removed; perhaps that anatomical structure needs not just one but many defenders. Hite was an advocate of female pleasure without penetration. In 1976, when she published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, it seemed as though such a thing had never been suggested before. She took the penis out of the discussion.
Katherine Angel describes a lecture given by Hite in her first book, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (2012). Angel is a British academic with a Ph.D. in the history of psychiatry and sexuality, and part of a new generation of female writers who are revisiting ideas of female submission. The talk is given in a boxy, gray room in Bloomsbury, London, and Angel finds herself increasingly irritated and fidgety as she listens to Hite’s thoughts about sex: “Gradually, the starkness of her vision—supported by murmuring around me—becomes clear: penetrative sex is unpleasurable, and demeaning. Women, she says, should abandon sex with men.” Angel has no interest in doing any such thing. “I want to growl,” she writes, “in defense of the men who, because they responded to me, because they loved me and wanted me, gave me so much pleasure.”
At a seminar about pornography, Angel is unconvinced by a man who has seen “more pornography than anyone.” This man argues that the form can be joyful and positive, not to mention democratic, especially since it went amateur. He speaks (this must have been some years ago) of the educational value of such footage, because of the way it “can show you ‘what goes in where.’” Angel’s heart sinks at this remark. Why is porn always about penetration? “Pornography guy” “has a quiet swagger. He holds your gaze. He likes being the person he is.”
Angel is not against pornography as a form. She quite likes looking. She understands the erotic potential in pornography’s “frenzy of the visible” and is suspicious of people who tell other people what they should like or not like. At a large feminist gathering, a speaker decries pornography’s emphasis on male violence and female submission, and ends with “a wholesale ruling on the importance of polite, gentle sex within committed relationships.” Something about this makes Angel uneasy. What about people who, whether in a romantic relationship or not, “have sex that plays with power, that involves poses and gestures of submission and domination”? Why is there no way of discussing these interests, as a woman, without being accused of delusion, ignorance, or collusion? Angel is not satisfied by the invitation to raise her consciousness in this regard, and runs off with a pal for mid-afternoon gins. Angel finds something positive in pornography’s fantasy of an unproblematized, desiring woman. The male viewer “tries to insert himself into that endless loop of arousal and desire, of hunger and satiation.” In order to effect such an insertion he would, of course, have to get offline, in which case he would be inserting himself into another human being. And though I am stating the obvious here, the difference between the imagined and the real sexual encounter is worth restating, because it is surprising how quickly the other person gets lost or accommodated when we talk about wanting—and how, when we think we are talking about sex, we may actually be talking about reverie.
“The desire to speak desire . . . is also erotic; it contains its own excitement.” Unmastered is a sassy piece of truthtelling about the unruliness of sexual impulse: “These fantasies—of submission, abandon, extremity—stand hand on hip, daring the feminism of my youthful politics to stifle them.”
Angel is not afraid to put her life into her work. Unmastered is a personal account of a highly charged erotic relationship and is written in lyrical scraps that echo the sense of undoing she experiences during sex. There is an interest in being scattered or rendered absent by being penetrated. She quotes Susan Sontag’s early diaries: “Fucking vs being fucked . . . . The deeper experience—more gone—is being fucked.” When she introduces the idea of violence to the relationship it is done almost as a plea for coherence. In the middle of frenetic sex, “nothing happens in sequences; nothing is discrete .... I want him to do something like hitting. Something—something— that would stop me in my tracks.”
Over time, this impulse settles into a more steady, managed kind of masochism:
When he grabs my hair, when he presses my throat, when he holds my hands down, I know—because I feel—that this is pitch-perfect. It is pitch-perfect because I can feel his tenderness, his humility, in this exploring, this wading into the sea together.
This is an invocation rather than a description and seems to contain no physical pain (the sea?), but it shows both participants deeply attuned to the needs of one who is submissive. The masochist is—at least in the writing of it—in charge.
Angel is reluctant to reverse the polarity of the power relations in bed. When she goes on top, the position feels “deeper, rageful, guttural” and she is afraid of “becoming a man.” Her partner’s passive enjoyment also disappoints her, though she knows she is being reductive: “I lock him into his masculinity.” She cannot do otherwise:
“I was weaned on this—the hypostasized, brutal man; the yielding, deferring woman. So, by the way, were you.” Well, up to a point. If we are talking about culture, then the trope of the brutal man and yielding woman is everywhere to be found. But if we are talking about gender dynamics in a child’s early life, then I have to say that I was weaned on slightly different stuff. I push back at this kind of appeal to the reader, in part because I find it seductive—hard to tell if it is an invitation to submissiveness or to feminist anger— but I am also wary of the way it echoes, albeit faintly, the abuser’s I know what you are, better than you know yourself. “I ask him if he would tie me up. Yes, he says, but when you don’t ask me.” Her partner does finally surprise her, and the previous balance of humility and perfection is broken: “There is utter silence between us, just feelings of rupture.” She does not want a safe word, and she is grateful that he did not check in with her first. “Afterward, he undoes the belt. We have some lunch and go for a walk.” Sometime later, the love affair begins a “silent, sideways keel.” Angel experiences “torrential unhappiness” after an abortion, and the relationship comes to an end.
Her willingness to be honest, personal, and sometimes off-message makes Angel a useful contributor to discussions about sexual politics. This is a writer who insists on the contradictory and shifting truths of the individual life. In her new book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, she recasts her interest in power in light of the Me Too movement, but her resistance to “polite” sex remains. The book is broken down into four chapters—“On Consent,” “On Desire,” “On Arousal,” and “On Vulnerability”—and in each, a free-ranging discussion of female difficulty and feminist response turns up some useful, irreducible distinctions. It is a book about heterosexual consent that makes arguments against consent politics, and though these are sometimes social, Angel is also interested in biology and in the mechanisms of desire. Angel points out that many kinds of bad sex can also be consensual—a sex worker, for example, may say yes without enthusiasm. So consent can distinguish sex from assault, but it cannot be used to distinguish good sex from bad sex, and although Angel aligns herself with the usual legal position on the matter—“consent is a given, the bare minimum”—she does not think that the rhetoric of consent is the way to transform the ills of our sexual culture. She questions those who urge women to have a conversation about sex before going into the bedroom.
This “injunction to women to clearly know and speak their desire,” to be vocal and affirm our willingness, continually and with enthusiasm, is not the way to make us happy in bed. “That we must say what we want, and indeed know what we want, has become a truism it is hard to disagree with,” Angel writes, after which she does just that. The book argues for uncertainty and vulnerability. Throughout, Angel tries
to defend a sense that sex requires relinquishing control. There is, in good sex, a reciprocity of destruction; it involves confusion, dissolution, and a merging of identities that frees us from gendered roles. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again is part of an emancipatory project that, paradoxically, asserts a need not to be strong.
The book encompasses feminist arguments about social inequality—you cannot assert an equivalence of desire between men and women when there is no equivalence of power. The statistics Angel quotes show that women in general are not having a great time: “Women suffer disproportionately from sexual difficulties, pain and anxiety. They report lower satisfaction at their last intercourse as well as over a lifetime.” Angel does not speak of childcare, wages, or domestic labor, but she does note that women’s problems are made worse by prevailing power structures: for example, women of color are more in danger of being sexualized, exploited, or raped, and the rate of conviction for their rapists is lower than even the abysmally low conviction rates in the general community.
Given all this, Angel is concerned that consent “is being asked...to address problems it is not equipped to resolve.” You’d think it might at least help to cure those inequalities, but she seems to say it reinforces them. Consent “represents sex as something a man wants, and something a woman agrees or refuses to yield.” Moreover, our current “fixation on yes and no” puts the onus back on women to fix the general wrong that is being done to them. Women’s speech now bears a heavy burden: “That of ensuring pleasure; of improving sexual relations, and of resolving violence.”
Desire is not knowledge. Angel’s description makes desire seem almost like the opposite of knowledge: “A woman . . . might not either want or not want sex; she might be hovering between these stark stances. We don’t always begin with desire.” In order to consent, a woman must know what she wants, and that knowing may be not just unavailable to her, it may stymie the sexual enterprise, which is one of exploration and discovery of the previously unknown. Our desires emerge in interaction, they are uncertain and unfolding, and this can be, or should be, unsettling. Sex is destabilizing: “We need to articulate an ethics of sex that does not try frantically to keep desire’s uncertainty at bay.”
Much of the book is spent discussing and sometimes debunking ideas about female arousal, and Angel is alert to the absurdities involved in the research. The sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who managed to be both liberating for women and very creepy, reported that, under laboratory conditions, and while they watched, women had a capacity for multiple orgasms, remaining at nearorgasmic levels for much longer than men. Feminists of the 1970s found this resarch useful and empowering. A more recent experiment, by Meredith Chivers and colleagues at Queen’s University in Canada, found that women have a physiological response to pretty much anything that looks sexual, including a video of mating bonobos. The women participating in the experiment said that a video of mating bonobos did not arouse them, the evidence of their vaginal plethysmograph, which records changes in blood flow, notwithstanding. “Women, it seems, are physically turned on by everything,” Angel writes. Sadly, we do not seem to know this. Or we cannot admit to knowing this. In the same experiment, men usually said they were not turned on by mating bonobos, and the laboratory equipment agreed with them. Male arousal is “specific to their stated sexual desires and orientations.” They know what they want, they know that they want it, and if their body does not agree, then there is always Viagra. The manufacturer of the blue pill, Pfizer, as Angel points out, “cannily sensed that the failure of desire in a man is oxymoronic.”
This research, which seems to speak of female polymorphous unconscious desire, is, as they say, “much touted.” You might get tired of the bonobos. (I never do get tired of them: bonobos do it every which way; they are the only primates other than us who have sex face-to-face, the only nonhuman species to engage in tongue-on-tongue kissing; they are matriarchal, which may explain all that, or none of it, depending on your point of view. I am also not turned on by bonobos.) The dark side of this research is the implication that women are always interested in sex, if only they could admit it. This is a fundamental tenet of rape culture, which also implies that women are deceitful, self-deceiving, or unworthy of agency. This discordance between a woman’s mind and her body (if that’s what it is) reinforces male fears that female sexuality is unruly, perplexing, and mysterious. The idea that desire is a simple, biological, and unstoppable drive for men but not for women is also a tenet of rape culture, and helps explain those times when women paradoxically consent to sex in order not to be raped. Angel argues that, unlike the drives of hunger or thirst, desire does not operate on a deprivation model for either gender. She does, however, support the idea that male desire is “spontaneous” and female desire “responsive” to explain why women are perceived as suffering from a lack of overt sexual interest. The intention to have sex doesn’t “just happen” for women as often as it does for men; it may, however, be elicited. She quotes contemporary work by Rosemary Basson, the director of the Sexual Medicine Program at the University of British Columbia, that describes a kind of loop in which the sexual setting, “the relationship, the power dynamics, the safety and trust . . . are all critical in enabling or impeding the virtuous circle of arousal and desire.” So men can persuade women into bed by supplying context first (“love,” perhaps) and then by arousing them. This also feels a little transactional. No matter where we start from, we are always back in the same place.
And really, you can get sex studies to say anything you want them to—there are women who are inconvenienced by orgasms while doing ab exercises at the gym, and women who can induce orgasm while in fMRI machines, by the power of thought alone. It is not clear to me, in the discussion of the “circularity” of female desire, what “linear” male desire might look like (apart from the obvious). You are always, when talking about desire, in some psychic space where before and after are hard to identify. Are men feeling specific or nonspecific desire when they search for images online? Does Viagra also improve their wanting? For Angel too, male desire is not just a biological given, it is “socially enabled, sanctioned and enforced behaviour.” Context is important for men as well, if only they could admit it:
Men, too, are motivated to pursue sex for non-sexual reasons, just as women are—by a need to assert their masculinity; by the link between erection, ejaculation and power; by the social punishments that follow if they fail. It is not that women have reasons and incentives for sex while men have pure desire; it is that we render men’s non-sexual motivations—their reasons, their incentives—invisible.
For either gender, sex and desire compromise our sense of personal sovereignty: “No wonder that, in women, this might provoke a frantic holding-on; and no wonder that in men it might provoke feelings of helplessness and rage.” We are rendered by wanting into a state of unbearability. This is why male desire “gets refigured so insistently as triumph over the woman; as denigration of her; as humiliation of her.” When this happens, men are working out the aggression they feel toward their own weakness and discomfort. How can we help men not to be “existentially destroyed” by refusal? The answer, for Angel, is an acceptance of a “joyful” vulnerability by both genders, though her discussion of male sexuality is pretty scant. A happily vulnerable woman says yes to sex while a happily vulnerable man refrains from violence, it seems. By these lights, men are afraid they will be refused, and women are afraid they will be hit. So much for a “mutuality of destruction”—this lack of equivalence seems deeply unsexy to me.
Her path out of these difficulties is not entirely clear, but consent is not a part of it. The burden of sexual ethics should not be placed on consent, but on “conversation, mutual exploration, curiosity, uncertainty.” “Yes” and “no” are words that should, you might think, form an important part in such conversations and curiosities, but Angel argues that these limit the uncertainty sex thrives upon, or at least the kind of sex that involves mutual need and equal risk: “Sex, if we are lucky, is not just exciting and satisfying; it also touches on our deepest fears, our deepest pains. And yet, how not to scare ourselves?” Some people say they use consent to clear a space where they can “scare” themselves without harm, but Angel just can’t find a line that divides the inside of a sexual interaction from its outside. “Sex is not an object,” she writes. “Sex is not something to be given and taken.” She insists that consent is not just insufficient as “the rubric for our thinking about sex” but also counterproductive, paradoxical, impossible, hard to do, and sometimes plain wrong. If you line them up, the list of reasons she gives or quotes is daunting: some women have too little power to give meaningful consent, some women have been conditioned by shame to refuse sex. The burden of “yes” makes a woman responsible for what happens to her, and sex should involve a release from responsibility. In order to verbalize her desires, a woman must know what they are, but such knowledge is not actually possible because sex is a process not of ordering up something already known but of discovering something new. And besides, there is the question of who does the “ordering.” She quotes Foucault’s maxim: “We must not think that by saying yes to sex one says no to power.”
She can also get a little weird. Some men, she writes, are turned on when women say “no,” and this is “yet another reason, then, that consent culture’s frantic valourization of saying yes is short-sighted.” This makes you wonder what women are supposed to say when they know what they don’t want. Underlying these sometimes strange arguments is a resistance to American feminist “confidence culture.” For Angel, this is based on “an almost manic insistence on strength” and finds all vulnerability unbearable or traumatizing: “You are vulnerable, therefore you must harden yourself; you are violable, therefore you must cast yourself as inviolable. You must become iron-clad, impenetrable.” Much of the writing by women about sex and power begs the question: whether penetration requires submission from—and there is, tellingly, no great or polite word for this—the penetratee. Does it make us lesser? Or does it make us lesser because men say that it does—or least some men, some of the time? The stark binary of penetration has produced many books about women and sex, some of which don’t actually mention it, at least not in a positive way, so it is good to read someone who is thinking from the inside of this heterosexual experience.
The model of desire that Angel puts forth, however, fumbles ideas of before and during, and considers all boundaries transactional. She seems to really struggle with ideas of female agency and with female imagination. “Knowing beforehand” may not be, in a biological sense, how female arousal works—penetration is always surprising—but there are many categories of knowledge. The aim of good sex might be to be “gone,” but you have to leave from someplace, and that place surely is one of consent.
According to Angel, “a lack of desire or interest is the most frequent complaint in women.” It is impossible to say how much of this anomie has to do with inequality or a woman’s sense of the unfairness of her life. Feeling “lesser” does not always feel sexy unless, perhaps, you are reading Foucault. A bit of “confidence culture” might not go amiss here. Angel may be irritated by an underlying puritanism in American feminism, but that is no excuse for going all French.
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again opens with the story of a woman who has won a competition run by the porn actor James Deen, in which the prize is to have sex with him on camera. The resulting footage is full of the woman’s indecision as, Angel says, she reckons with “the spectators inside her head.” As well she might. It feels important to point out that an argument taken from pornography is not always an argument about sex. It may be the case, as Angel says, that women feel exposed when they show desire, but they might also, in less exposing circumstances, not feel that way. What did humankind do before
the Internet? It is a great mystery, and one that future generations may not be able to solve. It is always too late to put the porn genie back in the bottle.
I was born in Ireland in 1962, so my formative years were unbothered by pornography (apart from reading Norman Mailer), but they were twisted and thwarted by Catholicism. I was twentytwo years old when contraception became legal, though in my hometown of Dublin you could find it if you knew where to look. Sex, in those years of change, was terrifying and also political; it was usually undertaken within a relationship, and it felt absolutely emancipatory. As least that is how I remember it. I don’t know if tomorrow sex will be good again, but I do know that yesterday it was fantastic. n
wrote, “I fear they’ll be almost exterminated in a few years.”
Dunn combines an intense emotional response to the radiant appearance of each transfixing bird with a pervasive anxiety that many of the birds he witnesses are on the verge of extinction. His first encounter with the marvelous spatuletail, in Peru, fuses vivid metaphor and close observation:
A searing bolt of turquoise, the colour of Caribbean water over white coral sand, shone from its throat above a tiny white body bisected by an inky-black stripe. Beneath him hung two midnight-purple discs, seeming unattached from the bird itself, so thin were the filaments of feather spine that supported them.
Among the rarest of hummingbirds, its habitat shrinking with the rapid deforestation of the Amazon, the spatuletail leaves in its wake, for Dunn, “a potent mix of elation and melancholy.” After catching sight of the Juan Fernández firecrown (“an intense dazzle of searing orange”) on a remote Pacific island infested with invasive plant species and feral cats, Dunn writes, “For the first time in my journey through the Americas I would be looking at a species that was almost certainly doomed to be extinct within my lifetime,” adding, “I felt like I could cry at the hopelessness of it all.”
A sheaf of Dunn’s photographs celebrates some of the most visually stunning of the three-hundred-plus hummingbird species. “Beneath those psychedelic feathers,” he writes, “were a host of adaptations to a nectarfuelled, hovering life that I found irresistible.” Reddish-pink feathers that turn iridescent in sunlight cover the head and throat of the male Anna’s hummingbird, which shows off to a potential mate by divebombing toward her from a height of a hundred feet. “He pulls up at the last possible moment,” Dunn notes, “fanning his tail as he does so, and emitting a loud chirp noise.” The speed of the courtship dive, reaching 385 body lengths per second, is “the highest known length-specific velocity attained by any vertebrate.” A hummingbird’s flight—and its uncanny ability to hover in place—requires enormous strength and energy. Its wings, powered by pectoral muscles that account for a quarter of its bodyweight, can reach a speed of up to ninety beats per second. Maintaining such flight requires hummingbirds to consume 3.1 to 7.6 calories a day— equivalent to about 155,000 calories for a human-sized animal—“powering,” Dunn writes, “a heart that beats around twelve hundred times per minute.” Hummingbirds need to feed at short intervals on flowers and insects to sustain such a metabolism; when food is unavailable, or the temperature plummets, they sink into a hibernationlike torpor in which their heart rate and breathing slow to a near standstill. In his 1862 book on orchids, Darwin had already identified the ways in which beak and flower had “coevolved”; certain flowers can only be pollinated by a hummingbird, and the loss of those flowers can spell doom for the birds, whose beaks have developed to reach that particular flower’s nectar. Ornithologists used to believe that hummingbird tongues, “so long that, when retracted, they coil inside the birds’ heads around their skulls and eyes,” absorbed nectar by passive capillary action. But recent research has revealed that rows of tiny flaps along the tongue open inside the flower and retract when the tongue is removed, trapping the nectar. As Dunn puts it in an elegant analogy, “The tongue, like the plants the hummingbird visits, blooms.”
In his epilogue, Dunn mentions that he has been in touch with the thriller writer and environmental activist Jeff VanderMeer, whose plots, as in his terrific Annihilation, tend to turn on ecological catastrophe, and whose latest novel, Hummingbird Salamander, involves an extinct hummingbird. VanderMeer informs Dunn that he experienced “a kind of vision” when he was eight years old and gravely ill in Peru. His hotel window was against a hillside, revealing a “little biosphere of moss and lichen and ferns in front. And just then . . . two amazing iridescent hummingbirds appeared, courting.” His new book is built around the same bipolar dynamism that drives The Glitter in the Green: the sheer wonder of hummingbirds and the fear that we are on a path, perhaps irreversible, to losing them.
In the opening pages, the narrator, a security analyst based in an unidentified city in the Pacific Northwest, is directed to a remote storage facility where she is instructed to open a particular unit. There she finds a box containing a stuffed hummingbird posed “in midflight, attached by thick wire from below to a small pedestal.” Accompanying the bird is a sheet of paper with two words on it, “Hummingbird” and “Salamander,” and the signature “Silvina.” In the suspenseful narrative that follows, Jane learns that Silvina, the black sheep of an Argentine family that has made a fortune on fossil-fuel extraction, appears to have embraced ecoterrorism to make amends.
Jane’s increasingly desperate hunt for Silvina reveals evidence of illegal trafficking in endangered species, including the dead hummingbird in the box, the last of its kind. Silvina’s trail reaches into remote regions of the Pacific coast, where Jane stumbles upon the remnants of a mysterious utopian community. It turns out that Jane isn’t the only person trying to figure out Silvina’s whereabouts. This is the kind of thriller in which the pursuer increasingly comes to resemble her prey. Along the way, there is a great deal of well-informed detail about hummingbirds. VanderMeer invented the species of the taxidermied hummingbird, the naiad (Selastrephes griffin), with the help of the biologist Meghan Brown. With its “iridescent black wings” and “sharp, long, thin beak,” the naiad once migrated from South America’s warming climate to woodlands in the Pacific Northwest ravaged by “unthinking development.” There is even a website for the naiad, which includes an additional contributing cause of its extinction: an invasive species supplanting the naiad’s coevolved flower—precisely the fate of the Juan Fernández hummingbird in Dunn’s Glitter in the Green.
The punning title of the traveling exhibition “Cross Pollination,” which I saw at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in North Carolina earlier this year, alludes to both pollinators and the mutual inspiration that can happen among a group of artists. Featured in the show are the works of Thomas Cole, the pioneering figure of American landscape painting, and his star pupil, Frederick Church. But the main stimulus for the show is Martin Johnson Heade, the artist who feared that hummingbirds were on the verge of extinction. Heade shared a studio with Church on 10th Street in New York City. Church had found inspiration for his famous panoramic painting The Heart of the Andes while traveling in South America; Heade determined to make the same trip, in 1863, in search of hummingbirds.
Heade’s rival, the British ornithologist John Gould, had dazzled the Victorian world with his exhibition of stuffed hummingbirds at the Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851. “I have wasted my life with mineralogy,” John Ruskin remarked. “Had I devoted myself to birds, their life and plumage, I might have produced something worth doing. If I could only have seen a humming-bird fly, it would have been an epoch in my life.” Gould, who followed up his success with a multivolume book on hummingbird species, had never seen a hummingbird fly. His illustrations, in which the glorious birds are surrounded by white space, gave no sense of where the birds lived. Heade was determined to paint them in their natural surroundings.
It was a brilliant stroke to place, at the entry to the Reynolda exhibition, sixteen paintings from Heade’s Gems of Brazil series. The small pictures (roughly 12 by 10 inches) are arranged in a four-by-four array, suggesting both the taxonomic order of the ornithologist and the modernist grid of postwar American art. They depict fifteen hummingbird species along with a butterfly, the blue morpho, one shimmering wing brilliantly illuminated and the other in shadow. The exhibition, according to the catalog, “takes flight from this unprecedented series.”
For his Gems, Heade developed a dynamic structure that fused intimate vignettes of birdlife with sublime vistas reminiscent of Church in the background. In Heade’s Amethyst Woodstar, the hummingbirds seem like flowers sprung from the tendrils of a spiraling vine. The dreamlike pattern is so mesmerizing that it’s easy to miss the nest hanging below the birds with two hungry chicks clamoring for food, or the distant mountain range obscured by clouds. As Kate Menconeri and Julia B. Rosenbaum note in the exhibition catalog:
The wide-angle views that make up the backgrounds suggest a larger environment and provide Heade with a way to present the birds less as isolated specimens and more as part of a greater whole. With The Gems, Heade was making a different kind of landscape, one that pictures the intricate operations within nature itself. His stormy skies, parting clouds, and layered mists in which the birds operate also allude to transitions and the dynamic web of nature.
Heade developed this distinctive way of depicting hummingbirds in the wild, they suggest, by combining “scientific curiosity” and an aesthetic “sense of wonder.” Heade seems to have been aware of Darwin’s claims about the coevolution of birds and flowers. Nature, Heade wrote, “must . . . have intended to confine [the hummingbird’s] depredations to the flower in question... while on the other hand the flower might yield the bird exclusive sustenance in honey, as all other species are denied participation of its insects by the peculiar construction of its deep corolla.” Still, Heade was willing to bend the facts to enhance the sense of wonder. He portrayed his hummingbird pairs in domestic harmony, even though the “husband,” as he referred to the male, takes no part in nest-building or feeding the young.
In his fascinating new book on the Quaker artist Edward Hicks (1780– 1849), Sanford Schwartz ventures a different provenance for the innovative structure of Heade’s paintings. Hicks is best known for his Peaceable Kingdom series, in which barnyard animals hang out with exotic beasts as though posing for a casual family photograph. In such paintings, Hicks may seem to present a utopian moment of serenity in accord with their source in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, often shortened as “the lion shall lie down with the lamb.” Schwartz, by contrast, finds something “tense and unsettling” in these paintings, as though the animals were attending “a peace conference that has only just gotten underway after a recent ceasefire.” He discerns a similar tension in Heade, who served an apprenticeship under Hicks. “Heade’s pictures, which are unlike anything in American art (or art), are thought to be inventions on his part,” Schwartz writes. However,
the structures of Heade’s and of Hicks’s scenes are the same: plants or animals are seen right at the lip of crowded, small stages, with a landscape behind them. And we look at scenes that suggest aggression or the craving of one participant for the other—here momentarily suspended.2
Late in life, Hicks painted a Noah’s Ark, “an ultimate story,” as Schwartz puts it, “of creatures on the move.” Amid “one of the most charged and beautiful skies in nineteenth-century American painting” there is a “sunny patch that will soon be obliterated,” and “countless diving birds, initially hardly visible, seem to be breaking up the storm clouds and propelling them forward simultaneously.” The tale of Noah’s ark is a story of ecological catastrophe, of course, and it concludes with a dove bearing a message of hope. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Dickinson wrote. But is there hope for the hummingbird?
Interestingly, both Dickinson and VanderMeer associate hummingbirds with letters. When Dickinson wants to convey how fast hummingbirds fly, she thinks of them as speedy letter-carriers:
2
In my book A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (2008), I suggest some other ways in which Hicks might have influenced Heade, including their preference for painting in series.
“The Mail from Tunis—probably,/An easy Morning’s Ride.” In signing the poem “Humming bird,” she portrayed herself, Helen Vendler notes, as “a poet who arrives, like the bird, quickly, vividly, and disturbingly, as she delivers, in her glittering linguistic plumage, her own exotic Mail.”3 VanderMeer’s book turns on two letters, one beginning with the word “Hummingbird” and the
3Dickinson also links letters and hummingbirds in her poem “All the letters I can write.” other, which includes the big reveal of the book, ending with it.
For Dickinson and VanderMeer, it is as though these tiny, vulnerable, magnificent birds—which Heade already feared we’d kill to the last one—had a message to deliver to us. Dunn thinks he knows what the message is. The hummingbird is “the most beautiful canary in the coalmine,” he writes, signaling that “the clock of extinction is ticking loudly.” But has the message been delivered in time to reverse the route of evanescence? n
as the “Queen City of Expositions.” The French were determined to make the Exposition Universelle of 1900 the most impressive of all, allotting 350 acres to it in the center of Paris. Forty countries participated, many of them building their own elaborate pavilions inspired by some famous structure or landmark from their native land, while displays of the countries’ contributions to science, culture, and industry were placed in satellite buildings.
The Americans modeled their pavilion after the US Capitol, and in the Palace of Social Economy and Congresses exhibited information about labor unions, tenement housing in New York, libraries, and industrial regulation. And in one corner was an eye-catching display, set up like a small study, titled “Exposition des Nègres d’Amérique.” Originally there was no plan to include African-Americans in the US presentation. But two Black men, Daniel Murray, an assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, and Thomas J. Calloway, a lawyer, newspaper editor, and confidant of Booker T. Washington, had realized that the exposition was the perfect venue for showing the world some of the achievements of Black America. Calloway had been a state commissioner for the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, where Washington gave what has come to be called his “Atlanta compromise” speech, in which he suggested, among other things, that Blacks stop agitating for social equality and full voting rights in favor of working for economic self-improvement. Sensing the opportunity to focus world attention on the situation of Blacks in America, Calloway wrote to prominent Black leaders throughout the country, including Washington and the suffragist Mary Church Terrell, explaining the potential benefits of mounting such an exhibit:
Thousands upon thousands will go [to the fair], and a well selected and prepared exhibit, representing the Negro’s development in his churches, his schools, his homes, his farms, his stores, his professions and pursuits in general will attract attention...and do a great and lasting good in convincing thinking people of the possibilities of the Negro.
Washington was duly impressed with Calloway’s idea. As Linda Barrett Osborne writes in the introduction to A Small Nation of People, David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis’s book about the “American Negro Exhibit,” he
appealed personally to President William McKinley, and just four months before the opening of the Exposition, Congress belatedly appropriated fifteen thousand dollars to fund an exhibit “of the educational and industrial progress of the negro race in the United States.” Calloway was appointed special agent and turned to his friend and former classmate at Fisk University, W.E.B. Du Bois, for help.1 1See A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress, Library of Congress, with essays by David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis (Amistad, 2003).
Du Bois was teaching sociology at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), and he agreed immediately. With $2,500 and the help of students and faculty, he went to work, taking over the exhibit planning and recruiting researchers across the South to gather data about Black American life.
Two recent books return to this story with an emphasis on the exhibit itself—W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America and Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition. The former presents for the first time in book form the unusual infographics the Atlanta team created. The use of charts and graphs had become popular among economists, geographers, and others by the mid-nineteenth century, but they were not yet widely familiar to the general public. As Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer write in a brief but informative discussion of the Paris exhibit in their new book, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication, Du Bois decided that research data colorfully presented would be the best way to present a “graphical narrative” showing the dramatic gains Black Americans had made since the end of slavery. His research was made possible, they note, “by the 1870 expansion of the US Census, which, for the first time, included the AfricanAmerican citizens in the national accounting.”
Concentrating on census data and information from the state of Georgia, which had the nation’s largest Black population, Du Bois assembled graphs, pie charts, and maps displaying such metrics of prosperity as real estate ownership, marriage rates, literacy, and entrepreneurship. The exhibit included a record of 350 patents granted to African-Americans since 1834 and an infographic—“Negro landholders in various States of the United States”— that employed bar graphs demonstrating the ratio of owners to renters among Blacks in nine southern states. Neither Black Lives 1900 nor W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits is intended to be a complete history of the Paris exhibit. For example, the tensions that arose between Du Bois, Murray, Washington, and Calloway over their differing visions of what the exhibit was supposed to convey are not explored. But then the story of Du Bois’s and Washington’s clashing philosophies has been told by many others. In these books, images take center stage.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits includes essays by coeditors Britt Rusert, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Whitney Battle-Baptiste, the director of that university’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center; the sociologist Aldon Morris; and the architectural designer and cultural historian Mabel O. Wilson. Silas Munro, an educator and designer, introduces and provides captions for the exhibit images reproduced in the book.
Black Lives 1900, edited by Julian Rothstein, includes a sample of the luminous photographs of AfricanAmerican men, women, and children that were displayed alongside the charts and graphs. The images are arresting: a group portrait of African-American nuns in Sisters of the Holy Family, New Orleans, Louisiana, in full habit staring solemnly at the camera; dentistry students at Howard University examining patients; male and female students reading books and newspapers in the library at Fisk University. Had there been no Civil War, all of the people in those portraits, occupying positions of responsibility or preparing themselves to do so, in their fine clothing and looking healthy, confident, and prosperous, could have been treated as property.
An estimated 40 to 50 million people attended the Paris Exposition, which ran from April to November. It may be difficult for current generations, living in the era of the Internet and instant access to information, to imagine the impact of the world’s fairs of the time. They exposed people in the host country and travelers from all over to the societies displayed in the various exhibits, and often to startling new innovations as well. The Paris Exposition of 1889 had seen the debut of Gustave Eiffel’s tower, which in 1900 was still a subject of controversy—people could not decide whether it was a beauty or a blight. Among the marvels of the 1900 exposition was a moving sidewalk and an enormous Palace of Electricity—over 1,300 feet long and nearly two hundred feet wide—which provided power to the entire fair.
The separation of the “American Negro Exhibit” from the other US displays fit its purpose. Devoting an exhibit specifically to Black Americans suggested that they, indeed, constituted a separate society. In Du Bois’s words, the infographics made up “an honest, straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.” The “Americanness” of the Blacks depicted was unquestionable. But given that Black people had started their journey outside the American polity and were still kept from full participation in it, seeing them as a nation within a nation made perfect sense. Morris writes:
The designation of a black nation conveyed the idea of a community with its own integrity, intricate culture, and complex social organization. This counterintuitive portrayal stunned throngs of world visitors who had never seen African Americans through this lens. The exhibit violated white thoughts about black people, especially Americans only three decades removed from slavery.
One feature that drew particular attention was the Library of Colored Authors. Daniel Murray and the team had collected more than two hundred books written by African-American men and women, along with pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers.2 In an article that ran shortly after the fair opened,
2See Lauren E. Helton, “Black Bibliographers and the Category of Negro Authorship,” in African American Literature in Transition, 1900–1910, edited by Shirley Moody-Turner (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
a New York Times correspondent commented, “It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that no one would have believed that the colored race in this country was so prolific in the production of literature.”
This presentation of a group of Black Americans as successful and worthy of admiration fit squarely within Du Bois’s writings and philosophy at the time. He was in his “Talented Tenth” phase, thinking that only the most educated Blacks could shepherd the race into a better future. As he became enamored of socialism, he moved away from the idea that elites should be in the vanguard of Black progress and instead began to champion the power of the working class. At the turn of the century, however, he still believed it was important to showcase the existence of a middle and upper class among Blacks, people who could become part of a leadership cadre.
The chronicle of achievement Du Bois assembled began during enslavement. One of the charts, we learn from W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits, “was displayed in a wooden frame carved by a former slave who lived in Atlanta.” Battle-Baptiste and Rusert note that the choice to present the material in this way pointed “neither to historical progress nor to the overcoming of the slave past but to the ways that slavery continued to quite literally frame the present.”
While Du Bois certainly did not want people to forget the past, there is no question that he wanted to emphasize for viewers the hope of the present moment and the future. An infographic titled “The Georgia Negro: A Social Study” depicts a globe seemingly split in half and flattened: one circle contains Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia; the other, North and South America. A line in script beneath the hand-drawn image announces that it is a map of the African diaspora (what is now often called the Black Atlantic). Lines drawn from Africa to places around the world show where Black populations existed, and different shadings show their relative concentration; a small star on the US map calls the viewer’s attention to Georgia.
The exhibit was designed to challenge European notions of superiority using some of the mechanisms that had been employed against Black people for centuries. “Maps,” as Mabel Wilson writes in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits, were “critical tools in the European colonial project,” producing a
cartographic gaze that cultivated awayofseeingtheworld .... Cartography had given Europeans not only a way of navigating the oceans but also a means of exploring, mapping, and claiming territories in Africa, Asia, and the New World.
Du Bois claimed cartography, statistics, and science in general for African-Americans. The exhibit, with its presentation of information about Black prosperity and education— one graph showed that illiteracy rates among Black Americans were lower than those of Romanians, Serbians, and Russians—scored points without having to belabor them. Although the emphasis was on achievement, Du Bois did not want to paint too rosy a picture of Black Americans’ circumstances. He hand-copied Georgia’s various codes pertaining to slavery and Jim Crow to accompany the images of success, essentially saying, This is what we have been able to do in the face of legalized opposition to our advancement.
The
“American Negro Exhibit” was important not only for the information conveyed; Du Bois believed that how it was presented mattered. While he had the world’s attention, he emphasized innovation: the colorful charts and bar graphs were a “form of infographic activism,” as Silas Munro writes in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits, adding that the infographics’ strikingly “abstract shapes built from circles, triangles, and rectangles in bright primary colors” predated European avant-garde movements like Russian constructivism and De Stijl, and appeared at the Paris Exposition twenty years before the founding of the Bauhaus.
The reaction to the portraits of African-American life and the startling new way they were presented must have been all that Calloway, Du Bois, and their team could have hoped for. The exhibit won prizes from the exposition judges for its design and the history it presented, and Du Bois himself won a gold medal. The exhibit had a life after Paris in the United States, with stints in Buffalo, New York, and Charleston, South Carolina, and it received glowing attention in AfricanAmerican newspapers.
This was all very Du Boisian. A New England boy who believed in propriety but reveled in competition, he had set a high task for himself and he had succeeded. It was a time when the notion of race uplift through the meeting of bourgeois ideals had great currency. As admirable and necessary as it was in 1900, however, it is likely that some readers today will pause over the exhibit’s underlying premise: that showing white Europeans and Americans examples of what we today call Black excellence would change their minds about Black people. This notion was in keeping with Du Bois’s scientific bent. It is also evidence of his basically hopeful nature, despite his presentation of himself as clear-eyed and realistic about relations between the races.
The truth is that whites on both continents had already had ample occasion to see and acknowledge the achievements of African-Americans. Frederick Douglass (represented by a statuette in the exhibit) was one of the most famous men of the previous century. Booker T. Washington, also born enslaved, was the head of the Tuskegee Institute and became the confidant of presidents; the title of his autobiography was Up from Slavery. It was certainly known that Black people had formed churches and civic organizations, and were in universities and professions, and it is hard to imagine that whites were blind to the fact that Black people had done all this while laboring under the burdens that members of the white community had placed upon them. Something other than rank ignorance fueled attitudes about Black people both during slavery and afterward.
In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, who was frequently given to hyperbole, wrote with seeming sincerity that he had “never yet” found
“that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.” But he knew better. He assigned enslaved people to perform tasks at Monticello that required analysis and judgment: for example, he made George Granger the overseer of the plantation, and Granger’s son George Jr. the foreman of Monticello’s nail factory. It was simply not in Jefferson’s interest to admit publicly to other whites that the Black people he and his fellow Virginians were enslaving were capable individuals who might have thrived as free citizens, had they not been actively thwarted by the laws and customs of white society. Maintaining the racial hierarchy required living by and repeating agreed-upon fictions.
As much as the Europeans, and any white Americans who saw or read about the “American Negro Exhibit,” may have been impressed with what it showed them about Black Americans’ progress, there was no reason to think it would make most of them stop thinking that white people were better than Black people. More likely, the final judgment would be that some Blacks were better than whites had thought, or that there were more exceptions to the rule than they had realized. In truth, the issue was not then, as it is not now, a question that evidence can resolve. There would always be another test that Blacks had to meet, a standard that almost invariably found them wanting.
This is, perhaps, an overly cynical conclusion, made with the benefit of hindsight and from the safety of a position of relative privilege for which Du Bois and so many others laid the groundwork. The phenomenon of the “American Negro Exhibit,” as described in these books, reminds us that it is best to think of Black people’s journey through the American experiment as a series of stages, with each stage requiring a type of activism—a particular type of hope—best suited to the moment at hand. It is hard to imagine many Blacks today having any truck with the idea of gathering and offering proof to white people that Blacks are worthy and equal human beings, deserving of the right to live with dignity in their own country. And it is also unlikely that any Du Bois–like focus on propriety and rectitude as a means of advancement would escape criticism, though aspects of that criticism pose difficulties of their own.
Yet it may well be the case that what Du Bois and his collaborators achieved in Paris in 1900 was useful to AfricanAmerican people at the time. Whether whites were moved or not—and the US press seems to have mostly ignored the exhibit—it was a source of great pride for Black Americans. The Black press made much of what had happened in Paris, spreading the news of the exhibit across the country. Perhaps it even strengthened the resolve to fight strenuously for civil rights. There was reason for optimism, as the small nation-within-a-nation was on the move, progressing to a future that seemed bright.
It is worth remembering, however, that Du Bois himself, who after Paris tried everything he could as hard as he could, eventually gave up on the United States, ending his days in Ghana. There was always more to solving America’s race problem than presenting evidence of Black talent. n