Rachel Wise and Dr. Nancy Christiansen, English
Main Text
On 14 April 1936 at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, Orson Welles’ adapted Shakespearean play “Voodoo” Macbeth opened. The play was set in nineteenth-century Haiti and cast with only African Americans. This production was the first professional Shakespearean play with an allblack cast performed in the history of the United States, and it was a stupendous success. “Voodoo” Macbeth was produced by the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project, an organization started during the Great Depression as a way to provide jobs for unemployed actors and stage workers. The goal of my project was to examine the gendered relationship between the male Hecate and the three Voodoo priestesses in Orson Welles’ “Voodoo” Macbeth as a commentary on the male control of twentieth-century African American religious and secular practices. As I began my research, however, I refocused my topic around Welles’ representation of Voodoo and how it conflicted with or was similar to white and African-Americans’ differing perceptions of the religion in terms of sorcery, magic, and gender roles. Doing so allowed me to better establish the type of Voodoo within the play, and therefore the type of Voodoo “master” Hecate is portrayed as.
First, I focused my research on how the United States’ occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) changed perceptions of Voodoo and changed the overall African-American view of the country, a nation defined by its large-scale successful slave rebellion and subsequent political rule for a century by black Haitians. From the outset, America’s military occupation of Haiti confounded the “savage” political state of the nation with the Voodoo religion (Hurbon 183). Indeed within the first few years of the takeover, belittling racist images and texts of Haitian Voodoo were sent home— Lieutenant Faustin Wirkus’ The Cult of Vodou in Haiti 1915–1929, William Seabrook’s The Magic Island, and John Craige’s Black Bagdad, to name a few. These texts related Voodoo to sorcery, zombies, and cannibalism. The African-American response to the Haitian occupation was quite different: black Americans saw the country as a bastion of Pan-Africanism and hope. Although my research on the account of Voodoo in Haiti, Jamaica, and New Orleans by Zora Neale Hurston, a prominent African-American writer, is not complete, I have found her writings particularly interesting, for she legitimized Voodoo practice in the United States, although she relied upon stereotypes to characterize Voodoo in the Caribbean. Her writings prove the complicated nature of relations between Haiti, African-Americans, and Voodoo. My paper draws upon these differences to establish that Hecate is a stereotyped portrayal of a Haitian Voodoo witch master, informed by the texts of Wirkus, Seabrook, Craige, and even Hurston. Specifically, I look at images from some of the narratives to show that Welles’ portrayal of Hecate uses a similar representation of the Voodoo leader as a cannibalistic sorcerer. And in light of the imperialism of the United States in occupying Haiti, the play further confounds black political power with a savage form of Voodoo, condoning the United States’ entry into Haiti.
White Zombie, a 1932 blockbuster horror film, depicts the white conception of Voodoo like the texts produced from military occupation; however, it also offers an example of the white conception of perceived gender roles within the religion. White Zombie takes place in Haiti where a young white couple plans to be married, but an evil Voodoo master named Murder Legendre, who operates a sugar cane mill run by zombies, turns the young woman into a zombie to prevent her marriage. The conflation of zombies with Voodoo practices is particularly interesting when considered with Welles’ play. I argue that Welles’ addition of the group of cripples to “Voodoo” Macbeth—characters who appear in the courtyard of Macbeth’s castle and whose role in the play scholars have mostly ignored—are actually representations of zombies created by Hecate. In so doing, Welles relates Hecate to the horrific Voodoo master in the film, and therefore, the white American idea of Voodoo. In terms of slavery and gender roles the comparison between film and play is also fruitful, for the Voodoo master in White Zombie is an overseer of the plantation, which is mirrored in Hecate, who holds a whip to thrash the witches. While White Zombie does not address the role of black women in Voodoo, it does show the male Voodoo master as patriarchal and tyrannical. However, Murder’s enactment of power over a white woman is similarly seen in Hecate’s abusive relationship with the witches in the play. White Zombie, then, is an important cultural artifact to consider when analyzing Welles’ play regarding its portrayal of Voodoo.
In terms of authentic gender roles within Voodoo worship, I found little written on the importance of females’ religious leadership in Haitian Voodoo, but discovered the prominent roles of American female Voodoo priestesses in New Orleans, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I looked to the scholarship of Karen McCarthy Brown and Claudine Michel to understand the profoundly important role of women in New Orleans worship, including figures such as Marie Laveau and Mama Loa. My research showed that Welles’ play strongly deviated from the norm of gender roles in Voodoo practices in the Untied States and from Haiti, for the witches hold subordinate power to Hecate. But at the same time, the women are endowed with supernatural powers, which they use to precipitate Macbeth’s downfall. So in choosing Hecate to be the epitome and center of evil in the play, Welles imbues Voodoo with a foreign masculinity, which, I argue, allows him to better relate Voodoo with magic, sorcery, and cannibalism.
My ORCA grant has allowed me to research in detail cultural factors that led Orson Welles to portray Hecate as a patriarchal Haitian Voodoo witch master—a subject not treated by scholars to date. I have been able to make connections between black and white perceptions of Voodoo in the 1930s and see how they function within the play. I have also noted the importance of the white response to the Haitian occupation during the early twentieth century within the play. I will be reporting my paper at the 2011 Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, and will be submitting my paper to the following conferences within the next three months: the National Undergraduate Literature Conference, the University of Minnesota’s Undergraduate English Conference, and the BYU English Symposium.