Du Bois’ Theory of Beauty: Battles of Femininity in Darkwater and Dark Princess

This article explores Du Bois’ theory of beauty that rests upon the axis of racial uplift and troubling, if not misogynistic, portrayals of women in his fictive works. The article employs depictions of women in two of Du Bois’ endeavors—Dark Princess and Darkwater—finding that his rigid abidance to the mandate that “all art should be propaganda” leaves women he deemed unattractive by the wayside. In his fiction and prose pieces, beauty is inextricably linked to politics and consequently the standards of including black women in art and literature became prescriptions for their places in life and his program of racial uplift. Had he taken the advice from other authors, such as Langston Hughes, he may have enjoyed the aesthetic liberty to invite all forms of exterior blackness into his project of aesthetic racial uplift serving early twentieth century black activism.