Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Stephane Mallarme's poem "Negress" delves into highly uncomfortable and complex terrain, touching on themes of power, desire, and race. This poem reflects a bygone era and its prevailing prejudices, deploying racial stereotypes and images that would be widely seen as offensive today. Nonetheless, a historical reading provides insights into the complex anxieties around race, gender, and sexuality that characterized the time and place of its writing.

The poem opens with the image of a "negress," a term that now reads as a racial stereotype but serves as a character embodying exoticism and taboo in the context of the poem. This character is "possessed by some demon," implying that her actions are driven by an insatiable, almost otherworldly desire. Her "girl-child" victim, "saddened by strange fruits," appears as an innocent figure subjected to the 'exotic' desires of the negress. The phrase "strange fruits" adds another layer of complexity, evoking the American context of racial lynching, though it's unclear whether Mallarmé intended this association.

The negress's physicality is hyperbolically described-she has "fortunate tits" and "dark shock of her booted legs," elements that serve to enhance her perceived sensuality and dangerousness. There's a fetishistic aspect to her physicality, marked by racialized and sexualized descriptions that project the speaker's own anxieties and fantasies onto her body.

The poem also deals with a raw, physical power dynamic, invoking images of both dominance and vulnerability. The "timorous nakedness of the gazelle," presumably representing the girl-child, sets up a power imbalance. The negress is compared to "an elephant gone wild," intensifying the contrast and the sense of peril. This unsettling juxtaposition serves to further otherize the negress, making her not just racially different but also almost monstrous in her ferocity.

The poem closes with an image that is intensely physical and tinged with both revulsion and attraction. The "alien mouth" is described as "pale, rosy as a shell from the Spanish Main," bringing in colonial imagery. The "Spanish Main" symbolizes the European colonial venture into the Americas, a background that adds further complexity to the already fraught relationships of power, race, and desire portrayed in the poem.

In summary, "Negress" is a poem that requires cautious interpretation, due to its deployment of racial and sexual stereotypes. Though disturbing, it provides a lens through which to examine the entangled anxieties surrounding race, desire, and power in Mallarmé's time. It lays bare the darker aspects of human psychology and social history, aspects that are uncomfortable but crucial to acknowledge and understand.

POEM TEXT:

Possessed by some demon now a negress

Would taste a girl-child saddened by strange fruits

Forbidden ones too under the ragged dress,

This glutton's ready to try a trick or two:

To her belly she twins two fortunate tits

And, so high that no hand knows how to seize her,

Thrusts the dark shock of her booted legs

Just like a tongue unskilled in pleasure.

Facing the timorous nakedness of the gazelle

That trembles, on her back like an elephant gone wild,

Waiting upside down, she keenly admires herself,

Laughing with her bared teeth at the child:

And, between her legs where the victim's couched,

Raising the black flesh split beneath its mane,

Advances the palate of that alien mouth

Pale, rosy as a shell from the Spanish Main.

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