Little White Similes: The Figure of Comparison and the White Feminist Tradition

¹ University of Virginia.

Abstract

This essay examines how simile functions as a mundane and pernicious mechanism of anti-Black racialization within the white feminist tradition that takes hold in the Romantic era. The past four decades of literary scholarship have tended to view metaphor as an operation that deceptively hides or erases the differences that a simile more honestly admits and compares—a received idea that descends from a poststructuralist, Nietzschean theory of tropes. Most rhetoricians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, understood both figures as enacting explicit (simile) or implicit (metaphor) comparisons, as did early white feminist writers who began to use the enslaved as a figural resource to control the production of racialized distinctions of gendered and ungendered being. Building on work in a Black feminist tradition of rhetorical reading that studies this production in the American context, especially bell hooks’s analysis of the “endless comparisons” that white feminists draw between “women” and “blacks,” I revisit familiar ground in early British white feminism—focusing especially on passages from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—to elucidate how similes insidiously create the seemingly essential differences between the terms they compare. Literary scholars who critique white feminism’s foundational rhetorical strategy tend to take issue with what and whom it neglects. This essay draws attention, instead, to its productive operation as a violent technology of race-making.