THE LIVING DEAD: DEBUNKING WHITE WOMEN IN "LITTLE DOG" - Term paper, research paper & custom essay writing service

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THE LIVING DEAD: DEBUNKING WHITE WOMEN IN "LITTLE DOG"

In Little Dog, Langston Hughes does not focus on the seductive aspects of white women. Instead, Hughes emphasizes another aspect of the typology of whites: the emotionally lifeless, repressed white who simultaneously regards blacks as embodying a physical and emotional vitality he or she lacks and who, therefore, possesses an approach/avoidance complex toward blacks, both wanting them and fearing them. The plot line of Little Dog is deceptively simple. Forty-five-year-old Miss Briggs, a single, white bookkeeper, is so isolated and friendless that she buys a little white dog, named Flips, to keep her company. She asks the janitor of her building, a young Swedish man, to buy meat and bones for her dog three times a week. Unexpectedly, the white janitor is replaced by a black man, Joe. Shortly after Joe has started delivering the meat and bones, Miss Briggs becomes flustered by her feelings of nervous anticipation and excitement as she awaits Joe's arrival with food for the dog. Miss Briggs becomes so baffled by her own reactions to Joe's brief visits that she decides she must move. "I've got to move. I can't be worried being so far from a meat shop, or where I eat my dinner. I think I'll move downtown where the shops are open at night. I can't stand this." Thus, Miss Briggs plans to deliver herself from her own personal white problem: her tortured feelings of attraction to and withdrawal from a black man. In examining the racial typology exemplified by Miss Briggs, one must rely on the mythology that has been expressed by many blacks: the white person who is emotionally withdrawn, physically unattractive, and behaviorally repressed. As explained by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, some whites know they are sterile creatures and hunger to know the "secret" which blacks, their antithesis, possess. Certainly, Hughes makes it evident that, in Joe, Miss Briggs sees and is drawn to her polar opposite. Hughes repeats that Miss Briggs is "alone" (156-57), that she has sacrificed any social life to take care of her sick mother, and even six years after her mother's death (at the time of the story), she is still friendless and socially inactive. "And there was no man in view to marry. . . . Miss Briggs had nobody at all. Nobody" (158). Moreover, she is so socially repressed that although she enjoys being smiled at by people she sees in the park as she walks Flips, she shies away from conversations because "[S]he hated people to know her business. . . . You could never know who people were, Miss Briggs thought, or what they have in their minds. . . . Miss Briggs didn't trust people" (159-61). The sterility of the life of "the gaunt white lady" (163) is contrasted to the life and personality of the black janitor, who lives amid "a mighty lot of laughter and kids squalling, and people moving" (162). Hughes also calls attention to the physical qualities Miss Briggs notices in the janitor when they first meet and to which she is clearly drawn: his "gentle" face (163), his "softly beautiful voice" (163), his "rich voice" (163), and Miss Briggs's impression that he "was awfully big and brown and kind looking" (164). Hence, it is no wonder that "Flips ate an awful lot of meat that spring" (165) for Flips is the pretext for Miss Briggs to develop her attraction to the black man. Yet, as is the case in many black-white relationships in literature and life, nothing is straightforward in the relationship between the white lady and the black janitor. Hughes makes it clear to the reader that the relationship with the janitor is part of a pattern for Miss Briggs: the main source of pleasure in this middle-aged white woman's life is black men. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that black men are the deliverers of pleasure to Miss Briggs. This aspect of race relations is first mentioned in the story in what at first might seem to be a minor detail. One of Miss Briggs's few pleasures is having dinner after work at the Rose Bud Tea Room where "the colored waiters were so nice. She had been served by Joe or Perry, flat-footed old Negro gentlemen, for three or four years now. They knew her tastes, and would get the cook to make little special dishes for her if she wasn't feeling well" (157). Miss Briggs's attachment to black men as deliverers of pleasure is made further evident by her reaction to both Joe the janitor and his wife. Noticing that Joe is "almost as old as [she] . . . but he was awfully big and brown and kind looking," Miss Briggs has him deliver the meat and bones every night (which certainly sounds like a sexual metaphor), not three times a week, as was the case with the white janitor (164). Yet, while Miss Briggs is "touched" by Joe's considerateness in bringing the meat, when his wife brings it instead, she is angry and upset in a way that reveals her attraction to the man:

Once or twice during the spring, the janitor's wife, instead, brought the dog meat upon Saturday nights. Flips barked rudely at her. Miss Briggs didn't take to the creature, either. She was fat and yellow and certainly too old to just keep on having children as she evidently did. The janitor himself was so solid and big and strong! Miss Briggs felt better when he brought her the bones for her dog. She didn't like his wife.

This passage, clearly packed with meaning, exemplifies Hughes's style of revealing the white woman's mind and her attitude toward blacks. First, one sees how Flips serves as her ego identity off-split by barking harshly to express both his and his owner's anger (Miss Briggs "didn't take to the creature, either"). Second, Miss Briggs's dislike for the woman has overtones of sexual envy, with the white woman rationalizing why the black woman should no longer have children with her (Miss Briggs's) object of desire. Thus, one sees the function of both black women and black men as givers of pleasure; and black women as either absent (they are very clearly omitted from Hughes's construction of Miss Briggs's life) or as reminders of the sexuality that is missing from the white woman's own life. Hence, in Miss Briggs's attitudes toward the blacks she encounters in the story, Hughes seems to be representing a key aspect of racism as discussed by Calvin C. Hernton in his chapter "The White Woman" in Sex and Racism in America:

The Negro male became the living embodiment of not only the white woman's sense of sexual poverty, but of everything that was wrong with her life and her society. . . . Few white women, and even fewer white men, will admit that white women feel a sexual attraction for Negro men. White people in general say that it is the Negro male who is attracted to white women; the reverse is flatly denied. . . . It is clear that somebody is lying.

Hughes's story is an attempt to present the truth that stands behind the lie.

Hughes's emphasis on the defense mechanisms employed by whites to protect themselves from realizing and dealing constructively with their own flaws is a central part of "Little Dog." For example, while Miss Briggs is clearly attracted to Joe, her defense mechanisms almost reflexively start up both in reaction to this attraction and to preserve the stability of the routine life and self-image she has of herself as a "sensible" woman free of any emotional, romantic, or sexual entanglements. The first of these defense mechanisms--repression--is evident even before Joe enters the story: "Miss Briggs had nobody. Nobody. Not that she thought about it very much. Miss Briggs was too used to facing the world alone, minding her own business, going her own way" (158). Nevertheless, Hughes writes that she still cannot stop her loneliness from coming down on her. . . . There were some nights . . . especially summer nights, when she thought she couldn't stand it, to sit in her window and see so many people go by, couple by couple, arms locked. . . . Miss Briggs wondered why she knew no one, male or female, to walk out with, laughing and talking.

This need for affection and companionship is clearly the source of conflicting emotions of loneliness and social anxiety. In addition, Miss Briggs's repression is especially evoked in response to her attraction to the black janitor. Although she has Joe deliver the meat daily and anxiously anticipates his arrival, "[O]f course, she never said more to him than good evening or thank you. Or here's a dollar for the week. Keep the change" (165). Why is she unable to treat the janitor in a casually friendly way? Why does she blush when Joe speaks and tremble when she spreads the bones on the floor for Flips? Why is she so stifled emotionally in Joe's presence? Why does her mind flip-flop as she tries to read after Joe's delivery? "She kept looking at the big kind face of the janitor in her mind, perturbed that it was a Negro face, and that it stayed with her so" .

Miss Briggs still cannot successfully repress her attraction which causes her to make. mistakes at work and to rush home anxiously in order to be there when Joe arrives. One passage reveals the woman's repression and anxiety: "'What's the matter with me,' she said sharply to herself, 'rushing this way just to feed Flips? Whatever is the matter with me?'"

But all the way through the warm dusky streets, she seemed to hear the janitor's deep voice saying, "Good evenin'" to her. Then, when the Negro really knocked on the door with the meat, she was trembling so that she could not go to the kitchen to get it. "Leave it there by the sink," she managed to call out. "Thank you, Joe."

She heard the man going back downstairs sort of humming to himself, a kid or so following him. Miss Briggs felt as if she were going to faint, but Flips kept jumping on her, barking for his meat. "Oh, Flips," she said, "I'm so hungry." She meant to say, "You're so hungry." So she repeated it. "You're so hungry, hey Flipsy dog?"

Anxiety, attraction, and repression account for the white woman's claiming (or clinging to) ignorance as to why she hurries home and, more generally, as to "whatever is the matter" with her. Furthermore, her contradictory emotions lead to a paralysis of action, for example, her inability to open the door for Joe as she swoons over him. Her swooning and Flips's simultaneous barking at her represent her chaotic yet stymied emotions. Finally, the Freudian slip ("I'm so hungry") and her projection of her own hunger onto Flips as she corrects herself all portray the psychodrama of which the black man is the mere object.

Indeed, Hughes emphasizes that Miss Briggs's repression is futile as long as she is in the presence of the black man. This fact is shown in a passage that takes place the day after the episode just recounted, when Miss Briggs lets Joe in and she struggles "not to look at him. But as he went downstairs, she watched through the window his beautifully heavy body finding the rhythm of the steps, his big brown neck moving just a little. "Get down!" she said sharply to Flips for barking for his dinner" (167). Once again, Miss Briggs misdirects her emotions at the dog, for it is not he whom Miss Briggs wants to "get down" but the emotions stirred up by her attraction to a black man:

Miss Briggs decided that she could not bear to have this janitor come upstairs with a package of bones for Flips again. She was sure he was happy down there with his portly yellow wife and his house full of children. Let him stay in the basement, then, where he belonged. She never wanted to see him again, ever.

The psychological aspect of the story is revealed in this episode. This passage raises intriguing issues. Why can Miss Briggs not bear to see Joe again? Are the first two sentences of this passage causally connectable? Does she not wish to see him because he is happy with his wife? Why does the black man "belong" in the basement? Is this idea an allusion to some whites' belief that blacks have a "place"? Moreover, why is there no middle ground for Miss Briggs between being attracted to a black man and banishing him from her mind and her life? This psychological banishment is clearly another example of repression; Miss Briggs wants the emotions aroused by her attraction to "get down" into the "basement" of her mind, banished from their destabilizing power over her routine life. Hence, though Miss Briggs takes the extreme measure of deciding to move to another building to escape from what is aroused in her by the presence of a black man on the periphery of her life, is this truly a resolution or merely an evasion? Indeed, a possible answer is indicated when she last sees Joe: "As his broad shoulders and tall brown body disappeared down the stairs, Miss Briggs slowly turned her back, shut the door, and put the bones on the floor for Flipsy. Then suddenly she began to cry" (169). Hughes emphasizes that banishing blacks from her life is Miss Briggs's loss, for while to Joe Miss Briggs is merely a "funny old white lady" (166), to her, he represents emotional and physical richness she can only desire and, as she is repulsed by her desire, shun. Ultimately, Joe is, to borrow Fanon's term for what black men often symbolize to whites, "a terrifying penis" ( 1967, 177). In addition, Hughes makes evident that the white woman's shunning of the black man leads to the embracing of a sterile, empty life as is, in this story, "the ways of whitefolks."

Little Dog, which starts as a simple story, is a metaphor for many aspects of how racism works. For one thing, Hughes seems to use the character of Miss Briggs to represent the psychological bankruptcy and neuroses that a white person can sometimes bring to an interaction with a black person. Furthermore, Miss Briggs's hysterical feelings about what should be an ordinary dealing with a black man symbolizes the ways in which racism can pervade even the most casual relations between the races. Moreover, Hughes indicates that, in such cases, the black person can be entirely free of guilt in doing anything to provoke this hysteria. The story also makes one wonder about the lengths to which some whites will go to banish blacks from their lives. Thus, "Little Dog" is a representation of a white woman as the quintessence of many aspects of racism.

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