{"id":131,"date":"2020-02-14T19:43:48","date_gmt":"2020-02-14T23:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/?p=131"},"modified":"2020-02-24T19:23:18","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T23:23:18","slug":"descriptions-of-the-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/2020\/02\/14\/descriptions-of-the-body\/","title":{"rendered":"Descriptions of the Body"},"content":{"rendered":"

One thing I noticed while reading McCann’s TransAtlantic<\/em> was the way that Douglass referred to and\/or described bodies of different people – specifically, the contrast between how he describes Lily’s body versus how he describes his wife’s body and his own body. Every time Douglass describes Lily, there is an implied grace and beauty in his word choice. He describes her skin as “so very pale”; her wrists as “cool” and “light”; her face “ledged with freckles” and her hair “sandy-colored”. All dainty words. He even describes her was “pretty”, though at the time he did not know that it was Lily he was describing. In contrast, Douglass doesn’t ever describe the way his wife’s body looks. His descriptions of her are limited to her emotional state (such as when he was imagining how excited she would look upon receiving a letter from him) and to what clothing she wore (such as when he describes her red scarf). We, as readers, have no idea what Anna might look like, other than the fact that she is black. Similarly, the only description we get of Douglass is a fleeting moment when he catches himself in the mirror and decides to leave his hair in the more “Negro style”. There are no descriptions of black bodies here; or, at least, not nearly of the same caliber as the descriptions of white bodies. Douglass has moments in the text where he realizes, as time goes on, that in Ireland there seems to be far less care about his skin color. He is surprised every time he realizes it again. I wonder if the lack of description of black bodies is simply because Douglass never felt<\/em> as though it was appropriate to praise them as beautiful or graceful. Obviously he knew<\/em> it – this was one of the rights that he was fighting for his people to have. But old habits are hard to break. Is this an intentional choice on McCann’s part, I wonder?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One thing I noticed while reading McCann’s TransAtlantic was the way that Douglass referred to and\/or described bodies of different people – specifically, the contrast between how he describes Lily’s body versus how he describes his wife’s body and his own body. Every time Douglass describes Lily, there is an implied grace and beauty in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Descriptions of the Body”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3681,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3681"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/blackandgreenatlantic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}