Dorothy Dandridge^s Photograph
35
view herself, then according to Lacan, the photo becomes symbolic of the fomiation
of Dandridge’s ego-ideal as she attempted to transform herself into what she
witnessed in the mirror. Dandridge wanted the mirror to reflect whiteness so that
she could mari^ a white man — white men, however, marry only white women.
Dandridge wanted to transfonn herself not so much into a white woman but into a
figure who possessed the signs of white womanness so that white men would want
to marry her. In order to achieve this mirror image, Dandridge had to kill the outward
signs of her blackness in herself, a process already begun by Hollywood, as the
tension between her interiority (blackness) and exteriority (whiteness) — or between
self and other ensued (Regester).
Color as a construct of race becomes compounded with sexuality. Freud
himself used the dark continent trope to refer to female sexuality. Thus, black
women, because of their blackness, automatically became sexualized. As Dandridge,
confirming these views, muses, “So many white men think there is nothing sweeter
than having a brown botf on the side, under wraps, taken in the dark or kept behind
the scenes” (107). Dandridge — because of her Africanness — is automatically
objectified because of her sexuality, and in the words of Laura Mulvey becomes
the object of the male gaze which “projects its phantasy onto the female figure...”
(11). Mulvey’s views, however, although not entirely applicable with respect to
race and sexuality, are applicable when she argues:
Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment
of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to
evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious
has two avenues o f escape from this castration anxiety:
preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma
(in v estigating the wom an, dem ystifying her m ystery),
counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of
the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film
noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution
of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a
fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence
over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue,
fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object,
transforming it into something satisfying in itself (13-4).
In posing for this photograph provocatively, Dandridge understood that she was
inviting the male gaze and that she was constructing herself as an object of desire.
That Dandridge was deliberately striving to connote desirability is apparent in her
posture and demeanor, with her slightly opened mouth and low-cut blouse.