| It is not a coincidence that the literary images of black writers are usually good,ignorant,happy,and submissive,but is a result of minstrel show’s profound influence.Rising from the early nineteenth century,minstrel performance,as the first type of popular national mass entertainment in the United States,occupied the American entertainment stage for more than 50 years.As musical comedy,the most prominent feature of the minstrel performance is that white actors wore black masks to imitate black funny vernacular and act to please white audiences.In the process from the emergence,to the prosperity and to the decline of the minstrelsy,sprang up a lot of famous performers,and a number of classic stage images,popular songs and dance were created.It made a great contribution to the formation and development of American music,dance,theater and culture.However,the minstrel performance that grew up in the unequal relationship between blacks and whites was shadowed from the beginning by racial discrimination.Although it helped the white to learn more about black culture,the speech and act presented were distorted by the actors.As the effect that the comedy mask attempted to achieve,the performance has played a critical role in mitigating the gap between blacks and whites and revealed the great potential of black culture to develop American culture.However,it also leads to a more profound identity problem in blacks and between blacks and whites,which reveals the tragic feature of black identity.First of all,after analyzing the complex social relations and historical background,this paper highlights the important innovation that minstrelsy made in making unique American popular culture and focuses on how minstrelsy influenced ragtime,blues and jazz.What’s more,minstrel performances also promoted the development of social consciousness and literature.Under the cover of black mask,white actors could freely ridicule social problems and criticize current affairs,theme of which involved race,civil rights,feminism and corruption.Although blackface performance has a positive role in American cultural innovation,but its distorted black image is so widely accepted that many white writers refer to stage images which are deliberately created by the white actors and are incompatible with increasingly racial awareness of the New Negro.Therefore,in the second chapter and the third chapter,this article selects Jim in Mark Twain’s masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Trueblood in Ralph Ellison’s "invisible man" as a pair of contrast to reveal the close relationship between these two images and minstrel performance.In the second chapter,this article starts from the relationship between Mark Twain himself and minstrel performance,and finds that his love of minstrel performance is mirrored by minstrelsy in his work in terms of topics,character description and the novel structure.Influenced by minstrelsy,Mark Twain depicted the novel character Jim just as same as the classic stage character,good but ignorant,and though the mouth of the black,expressed his criticism of society satire.In the third chapter,this article first explains the subtle link between Trueblood who committed incest with his daughter but was welcomed by the white and minstrel show,showing the tragedy of Trueblood.Compared with the protagonist of Invisible Man,it is impossible for Trueblood and other blacks like him to meet the self and to accept the self by meeting the desire of the white.The Invisible Man realizes the falseness and ruthlessness of the white society through the hardships,finds the most real self and gets rid of the false mask with the help of blues and jazz music.He becomes "the New Negro" that put forward in Harlem Renaissance.Ralph Ellison sees blues and jazz as the survival philosophy of the suffering blacks,and is crucial for guiding the black how to pull themselves free from the plight of self-identification.American society found the great potential of black music for the first time because of minstrel performance.American society’s stereotypes of the black also began with minstrel performance.Through the innovative comparison of the two works,this article discovers that the humanity of African Americans is neglected not only in society but also in literary works.Typical literary images of the black like Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,mislead their real humanities as human beings,while Ralph Ellison’s the Invisible Man gets self-consciousness of the black through music and reflection.Minstrelsy conventionalizes stereotypes in the white and black society,and even becomes a literary tradition,but black music develops vigorously and helps the black and black writers redefine themselves.This duality of minstrel show discloses its rich connotation and far-reaching significance. |
