“With Pitch and Tar Appeared in Pain”:
Whiteness and Disguise as Class Signifiers in Diane Dugaw’s Collection of Warrior Women Ballads
Sarah Chapman
In many of the early ballads from Dugaw’s catalogue, the hands of the Warrior Women are used as excuses from the lover why she cannot follow him to war. Either they are “Lily white” and can’t be soiled, or too delicate to handle the rough ropes of the sea. Ballads that feature this type of language where the Warrior Women end up following their lovers to sea also feature a transformation of her skin from white and delicate to rough and tanned. In this paper I will be analyzing these ballads through the lens of critical race theory. The tanning of skin coincides with (typically) lower class working conditions of being a sailor. The Warrior Women who exhibit this behavior are thus seen as lower class. I argue that class and race are closely mirrored in the use of this type of language to reinforce the dominant ideology of imperial England: whiteness is inherently higher class and darker skin is lesser and therefore should be relegated to harsher conditions like life at sea. I will be looking at ballads such as “The Banks of the Nile” , “Billy and Nancy’s Kind Parting”, “Young Henry of the Raging Main”, and “Constance and Anthony”.