‘The Best-regarded Virgins of Our Clime’: Unseen Black Women, Race, and the Construction of White Femininity in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>

Abstract

Using the tools of premodern critical race studies and whiteness studies, this article brings to critical visibility the Black women Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice evokes in passing, only to leave them on the margins of the text. Unseen and unheard, those women's alleged preferences in romantic partners are reported second-hand by the Prince of Morocco. It has become something of a critical and theatrical tradition to interpret this moment as revealing his alleged lustfulness, thus indulging in a sensational (and Orientalist) reading of him and them. I challenge this reading, proposing, instead, that the Prince's evocation of his countrywomen should be inserted within the play's (and early modern England's) larger investment in the construction of white femininity and the attendant fashioning of an emerging national white identity. The Moroccan virgins, I argue, are one strategy the Prince adopts to signal his proximity to patriarchal whiteness by announcing to his audience both on- and offstage his subscription to the gendered, white values which elevate white women at the expense of Black women. A white man's fantasy of a Black man, the Prince of Morocco deploys Black women as a tool to elevate white femininity and to announce his assimilability into Portia's white world.