ABSTRACT
“To wash an Ethiop white” is an ancient proverb used to express impossibility and bootless labor. Scholars speculate that it originated with Aesop, where the image of scrubbing an Aethiopian is used to demonstrate the power and permanence of nature. The proverb was common in Greek, and in Latin took the form “abluis Aethiopem: quid frustra” (you wash an Aethiopian: why the labor in vain). The emblem reproduced overleaf, from Geoffrey Whitney's widely circulated emblem book, A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden, 1586), moralizes the proverb in the poem printed beneath the woodcut. 1 The expression was proverbial in early modern England and commonplace on the English and Jacobean stage; in The White Devil, for example, the Moorish waiting woman Zanche promises Francisco coin and jewels, a dowry “should make that sunburnt proverbe false, / And wash the Ethiop white.” 2 By the nineteenth century, the proverb is so familiar that it works as the underlying presupposition of the popular advertisement reproduced above, which paradoxically inverts its meaning. Unlike the sixteenth-century emblem in which the Aethiop remains black despite the ministrations of the washerwomen, in the Pears soap poster the black baby has been scrubbed almost white. In the burgeoning consumer culture of the nineteenth century, the man-made promises to reveal beneath black skin a hidden whiteness unimaginable to early modern man. In the modern period, difference is effaced and whiteness is the neutral term. So on a sign posted outside a Sussex inn called “The Labour in Vain,” two men are represented “hard at work scrubbing a nigger [sic] till the white should gleam through” (Lucas, 1904, 311). 3 (The Whitney emblem is reproduced with permission from the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am grateful to William McLaughlin for sharing his collection of nineteenth century advertisements.)
Shakespear, who is accountable both to the Eyes and to the Ears, And to convince the very heart of an Audience, shews that Desdemona was won by hearing Othello talk. … This was the Charm, this was the philtre, the love-powder, that took the Daughter of this Noble Venetian. This was sufficient to make the Black-amoor White, and reconcile all, tho’ there had been a Cloven-foot into the bargain.
(Rymer, 1693, 221–2)It would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro.
(Coleridge [1960], I, 42)To a great many people the word “negro” suggests at once the picture of what they would call a “nigger”, the woolly hair, thick lips, round skull, blunt features, and burnt-cork blackness of the traditional nigger minstrel. Their subconscious generalization is as silly as that implied in Miss Preston's “the African race” or Coleridge's “veritable negro”. There are more races than one in Africa, and that a man is black in colour is no reason why he should, even to European eyes, look subhuman. One of the finest heads I have ever seen on any human being was that of a negro conductor on an American Pullman car. He had lips slightly thicker than an ordinary European's, and he had somewhat curly hair; for the rest he had a long head, a magnificent forehead, a keenly chiselled nose, rather sunken cheeks, and his expression was grave, dignified, and a trifle melancholy. He was coal-black, but he might have sat to a sculptor for a statue of Caesar.
(Ridley, 1958, li)