Douglass and We Wear the Mask

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties” (Dunbar “We” 571).

This stanza begins Paul Laurence Dunbar’s stirring poem about the lives of African Americans, “We Wear the Mask.” It is critically acclaimed as a Realist poem because of how accurate it is in portraying the feelings of African Americans in the late 19th century, when it was written.

After being emancipated after the events of the Civil War, many African Americans still did not feel that they were truly free, or as Paul Laurence Dunbar puts it, that they had to wear a mask. In the South especially, they were still treated as second class citizens and had to hide their feelings of sadness and anger from the whites who oppressed their spirits, just as it says in the poem, “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile” (Dunbar “We” 571). Since all these African Americans felt this way, downtrodden and like they had to hide their true feelings even from each other so that they would not force their burden onto those they loved, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem becomes a poem of Realism because he reveals the true feelings of a mass of people and connects to their feelings with this piece of literature.

Another way in which he connects to the audience is through his use of religion, however small, in the poem. Many African Americans of his day and age would have been very Christian, as the stories of freedom from bondage, equality, and a place where someday they would no longer have to toil and bleed appealed to the former slaves and their oppressed kindred spirits, and so adding the reference to Christ in the line, “We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries to thee from tortured souls arise” connects to the audience to an even further level (Dunbar “We” 571).

Another poem of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s, “Douglass,” written of course about the great Frederick Douglass, also connects to his black audience on similar levels as his poem “We Wear the Mask.” In this poem, lines such as, “We ride amid a tempest of dispraise,” and, “To give us comfort through the lonely dark,” reach out to the audience’s feelings of despair for how the African Americans are still oppressed and are seeking refuge from the storm of hate (Dunbar “Douglass” 570). Paul Laurence Dunbar also has a reason for choosing Frederick Douglass as the person for the poem to cry out to for help because Douglass was a very famous escaped slave who advocated emancipation for the slaves and was a very powerful orator. His presence empowered many of his fellow abolitionists with his strong yearnings for freedom for his people, so it is only natural that Dunbar and the other African Americans would want to call on him to help them fight for themselves again. Once more, this reaching out to the audience and having a subject matter that would pertain to their everyday lives makes this poem, like its brother, a member of the Realism family.

Works Cited

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. "Douglass." GlencoeLiterature. Ed. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 570. Print.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. "We Wear the Mask." GlencoeLiterature. Ed. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 571. Print.