We Wear the Mask: Historical & Literary Context

Literary Context Essay: Majors and Minors and Dialect

“We Wear the Mask” first appeared in Dunbar’s 1895 poetry collection, Majors and Minors. This title references the volume’s overall split between two groups of poems. The “major” poems, which make up most of the collection, are written in standard English. These poems also feature a highly conventional use of metrical form and rhyme, and they exhibit a seriousness of tone. With its traditional use of the English language, along with its strict deployment of the rondeau verse form and its grave theme, “We Wear the Mask” clearly belongs to the “majors.” By contrast, Dunbar wrote the collection’s “minor” poems in a form of “Negro dialect.” Though these poems do make use of meter and rhyme, they tend to be looser in form. They also generally deal with less serious themes. To get a sense for the language of Dunbar’s dialect poetry, consider the opening of his poem, “The Party” (lines 1–4):

Dey had a gread big pahty down to Tom’s de othah night;
Was I dah? You bet! I nevah in my life see sich a sight;
All de folks f’om fou’ plantations was invited an’ dey come,
Dey come troopin’ thick ez chillun when dey heahs a fife an’ drum.

Initial response to Majors and Minors especially praised the poems in dialect. This response reflected a broader critical preoccupation with the preservation of folk cultures. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, critical opinion came to see the dialectical verse as problematically stereotyped. Today, critics generally emphasize the “major” poems.

In addition to writing in standard English and “Negro dialect,” wrote some works in the Midwestern regional dialect, which he would have been familar with living in Ohio, as well as from the works of one of the most famous poets of the period, James Whitcomb Riley of Indiana. Known as the “Hoosier Poet,” Riley enjoyed tremendous popularity during his lifetime although he is little known today, except perhaps for his most famous work, “Little Orphant Annie.” He wrote several hundred poems, most in Midwestern dialect.

Historical Context Essay: Black American Life After Reconstruction

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1872, during a period of U.S. history known as the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). The Reconstruction era followed the end of the American Civil War, and it was defined by a twofold attempt to rebuild the country: first, by reintegrating the former Confederate states into the Union; and second, by redressing the deep inequities established by the legacy of slavery. When the federal government officially abandoned the Reconstruction efforts in 1877, neither aspect of the rebuild had proven fully successful. The Southern states had all been readmitted to the Union, but bitterness about the losses sustained during the war lingered. As for Black Americans, the dream of freedom that came with their legal emancipation remained elusive. When the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 granted men of all races the right to vote, fear grew among Southern whites about further losses of political control. Combined with deep bitterness about the war and rampant anti-Black racism, white anxiety led to widespread violence against Black Americans. This violence, perpetrated by organized groups like the Ku Klux Klan, compromised Black Americans’ freedom and effectively obliterated their rights as citizens–as did the enactment of far-reaching state and local “Jim Crow laws” that enforced racial segregation in the South as well as many states outside the South.

Such conditions continued to negatively affect Black American life at the time when Dunbar wrote “We Wear the Mask.” By the time of Dunbar's death in 1906, the right to vote granted to Black men by the Fifteenth Amendment and the economic advances made by Blacks during Reconstruction had mostly been reversed, a situation that would not begin to change until the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.