Dyer, "White Death"

[Dave Monroe]

>From Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997),
Chapter 6, "White Death," pp. 207-23 ...

"Death may in some traditions be a vivid experience,
but within much of the white tradition it is a blank
that may be immateriality (pure spirit) or else just
nothing at all.... a colour that also signifies the
absence of colour, itself a characteristic of life and
 presence." (207)

"The theme of whiteness and death takes many forms. 
Whites often seem to have a special relation with
death, to yearn for it but also to bring it to
others." (208)

"Within Western art the dead white boy has often been
a sight of veneration, an object of beauty.... Christ
on the cross ....  In Victorian times,
death--especially that of children, above all
girls--was seen as a fit subject for painting and
photography that had far more to do with beauty than
with tragedy ...." (208)

"The Oxford English Dictionary gives 'white death' as
a term for tuberculosis around 1910, and both Susan
Sontag (1979) and Bram Dijkstra (1986) have discussed
the importance of 'sublime pallor' in the
nineteenth-century perception of the then fatal
disease.  The beauty of white death, as well as the
romantic longing for it, especially in British and
German nineteenth-century poetry, are well-attested
(Praz 1933)" (209)

[See here Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor; Bram
Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Images of Feminine Evil
in the Fin-de-Siecle; and Mario Praz, The Romantic
Agony.  See also Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead
Body and Jay Ruby, Shooting the Shadow ...]

"It is said that when sub-Saharan Africans first saw
Europeans, they took them for dead people, for living
cadavers.  If so, it was a deadly perception, for
whites may not only embody death, they also bring
it.... the Ku Klux Klan ..." (209)

"This association of whiteness with the bringing of
death may reach its peak in the Holocaust.  At one
level, this may be seen as no more than yet another
instance of whites as the bringer of death to
non-whites, no more awesome than the histories of
genocide and slavery in the making of Australasia and
the Americas.  yet the Holocaust has a particular
place  in the symbolism of whiteness and death.  It
seems to represent the bringing to bear of the very
thing that whites claim as their special virtue,
civilisation, to wholesale human destruction.  It was
precisely the values of orderliness, systematicity and
hidden ugliness that were used to expunge from Europe
the Jews  and other human 'dirt' (that is, the
perceived sullying borders of whiteness)." (210)

"The idea of whites as both themselves dead and as
bringers of death is commonly hinted at in horror
literature and film." (210)

"It is at the heart of the vampire myth." (210)

"The horror of vampirism is expressed in colour:
ghastly white, disgustingly cadaverous, without the 
blood of life taht would give colour." (210)

"Anxiety about (as opposed to aspiration to) whiteness
as non-existence is not necessarily expressed in the
horrified terms of the dead bringing death." (211)

"Herman Melville's Moby Dick ..." (212)

... and so forth.  See also Richard Dyer, "White," The
Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London:
Routledge, 1993), pp. 141-63 ...







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