19 pages • 38 minutes read
We Wear the Mask
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Themes
Identity and Double Consciousness
Identity is one of the central themes the poem explores within its many layers, both up close and from a distance. The title of the poem “We Wear the Mask” introduces the main theme and refrain of the poem, the collective identity of African Americans, as something hidden away for safekeeping, for protection, and for survival. Covering up one’s identity for the sake of the world is repeated throughout the poem, which reveals the state of constant turmoil the speakers live in. It also paints a picture of another collective identity, “the world” made up of an audience indifferent to others.
The theme of a mask as a metaphor for concealing identity through a false identity, or W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of “double consciousness,” a term said to have been inspired by this poem during the Civil Rights Movement, is both simple and complex. A mask covers one’s face with another face, and one’s face is symbolic of their identity. Even children can understand this concept. As mentioned, the fact that race is not mentioned in a poem about identity, and knowing Dunbar’s life and history, the poem seems to also contain multiple identities as a result.
As a literary figure who struggled with his success personally and on the field, it can be inferred that Dunbar’s own experience with having to take on multiple identities and essentially wearing his own mask/s informed this poem on a deep level. Even while race is not directly mentioned in the poem, and many white readers glazed over the poem’s hidden meanings, the struggle for African Americans to conform to white society’s standards and the toll it took on their sense of identity is central to the poem’s complexity and remains a central, thematic concern of Black identity to this day.
Values and Society
Each stanza alludes to some sort of value system, whether morally or numerically, metaphorically or literally, or all of the above. Line 3 refers to the “debt we pay to human guile,” which can be interpreted as literal when analyzed through a lens of slavery and its aftermath as a financial system, and metaphorical to emotional to societal due to the human toll African Americans still carried, which is something incalculable. This sentiment is again repeated in questioning the worth of letting society with a broken value system become “over-wise / in counting all our tears and sighs?” (Lines 6-7). While not as explicit as the first two stanzas, the third stanza’s “long mile” (Line 13) implies that the speakers must walk a longer and more treacherous path than the rest, and that the value systems of society as “the world” (Line 6) are not created equal.
It’s been argued that Dunbar wrote “We Wear the Mask” as a response to his dialectic poems, so its appearance alongside those very poems in the collections seemingly solidifies this connection. The title Minors and Majors implies something musical, which Dunbar’s poems certainly explore, but for just the same, there is a greater than/less than sentiment in this choice. Bigger and smaller, more powerful and less powerful, these implications are carefully obscured, only to be fully understood by someone who can see beyond the mask.
Resilience
Although the poem can be viewed as a critique of oppression in society, it is ultimately a poem of resilience. The speakers never reveal themselves, maintaining the mask’s disguise while reflecting the ugliness of society. Many of Dunbar’s readers did not see the multiple meanings to the poem, readers he knew belonged to the very unwise world he wrote of, meaning the poem is not only about resilience but is a physical example of resilience. This poem is also credited with being a response to his white readers preference for his dialectic poems, which were well known and critiqued by his contemporaries.
Dunbar writes in a traditional form using standard English about a subject that could have possibly put him in danger, outsmarting the very readers he refers to as “the world” (Line 6): the poem is a work made from surviving. As the speakers describe their skills to “mouth with myriad subtleties” (Line 5), despite their “bleeding hearts” (Line 4) and “tortured souls” (Line 11). And while the mile is long “beneath their feet” (Line 13), “we sing” (Line 12), showing the distance the speakers go to survive.
There is a clear sense of pride in the ability of the speakers to maintain their multiple identities. The final line of the poem ends with an exclamation, as if the speakers are rising above it all. It is this particular sense of rising that makes the poem so powerful.
Resilience appears in the poem’s title and its double meanings, which both Maya Angelou and the Civil Rights Movement adopted. This support, along with the poem’s clever control and release of information in style and form, work together to make this poem stand as an example for the marginalized and oppressed.
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By Paul Laurence Dunbar
