Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Gabriella Varró: The Theme of Comic Love in Blackface Minstrelsy: The Anatomy of the Grotesque

'masculinized,' powerful women, not in order to submit but, through the pleasurable response, to take the power back" (161) .

9 It is hard to judge with any certainty what exactly was dramatized, inferred and acted out in the wench acts (whether taking into account the performer or the reaction and feelings of their audience); some note only the rarity or strangeness of the act (Toll)

, others like Lott go further to bring in psychosexual arguments about the homoerotic appeal or the white male's need to take the power back from women as inherent in such acts. Whichever interpretation we might accept, the physical grotesque in the phenomenon can undoubtedly be ascertained, and as for the racial, class and gender issues contained, it should suffice at this point to note their ambivalence, and complexity (which, however, might only be a result of projecting such implications into the act by late 20th-century observers).

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0 3. GROTESQUE ELEMENTS IN THE MINSTREL PROPS Although minstrel props can easily be seen as part of the physical appearance of the minstrel performer, I intend to separate the biological from the cultural by divorcing the intrinsically bodily features of representation from objects attached to the body, essentially because 9 Eric Lott devotes a whole subchapter in his book Love and Theft... to the wench character, analyzing it both along gender as well as racial lines of inquiry. Besides seeing this character as an apparent manifestation of the white man's frustrations in regard to womanhood as well as his own masculinity, Lott also believes that the wench role offered ways "to demystify [the] black men's sexuality" as well as to express "white male desire for black men" (163), and in a true cavalcade of varied impulses of desire, hate, identification, rejection and need to annihilate rival and potential sexual mate, the familiar irony of race presented itself. "[T]he act derided white America for its fascination with blacks while at the same time it marketed the fascination. Surely this structure of feeling," Lott claims, "evidences again the precariousness or dissonance or conflictedness that marked white people's sense of their own whiteness" (166). On the ambivalence of racial issues treated in minstrelsy see Ostendorf 65—94, and Lott's Love and Theft. 101