Strangers to their Own Skin: Black Girls in the White Gaze

Abstract

It is very rare to find a black female voice represented in nineteenth century fiction in the first person. The adopted daughter from Senegal, Ourika, is the first black female protagonist in Europe in the French novella, Ourika, (1823) by Duchess Claire Duras (1777-1828) while the domestic slave Sibila is the first black female protagonist in Latin America in the Venezuelan short story, “La sibila de los Andes,” (1840) by Fermín Toro (1807-1865).
Ourika and Sibila suffer the colonial slave history of a racial exclusion from marriage and motherhood. The decolonial race theories of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon constitute the background to understand the unrequited love stories of both romantic heroines. Regarded as inferior by the white society in terms of education, culture, morality, and spirituality, Ourika and Sibila stand up for themselves to reinvent themselves and resist racism.
This essay will depict the exclusion by white people of black women Sibila and Ourika, who at their coming of age, view themselves as potential wives and mothers, but at the realization of the white racism against them suffer the damaging effects of viewing themselves through the eyes of the other, bound to relationships of unequal socio-economic power. The coming of age of the black girls can be compared to that of Cinderella in universal themes, such as the passage of abused and unloved teenagers into religious adults through the impossibility of marriage and motherhood and the deprivation of family love. The three stories are similar also in the life circumstances of the protagonists, all orphan domestic slaves who become free after they are rejected by their loved ones. The comparison of their characterization will draw from the concepts of “double consciousness” by the Afro-American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and that of the “white gaze” by the Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.