Sexuality and Love Theme Analysis

Blues for Mister Charlie represents sexuality as a flashpoint for violence in an anti-Black white supremacist society, as in order to reinforce racial hierarchy, white supremacists must deny certain forms of interracial attraction while infecting others with violence. In this context, love—truly knowing and caring for another person as an individual—is represented as an extraordinarily difficult achievement. This dynamic is clear in the sexual and emotional lives of Jo Britten, a conformist white woman, and Parnell James, a rich white man with progressive racial attitudes (relative to the setting of the U.S. South in the 1960s). Prior to her marriage, Jo feels that she must repress all her sexual thoughts, implicitly to live up to a white-supremacist ideal of sexually pure white Southern womanhood. Though she is sexually curious about both white and Black men, she interrupts any such curious thoughts by insisting to herself that her mind is a “citadel” that must not admit sin. Eventually, Jo lies that a young Black man, Richard Henry, sexually assaulted her to prejudice a jury against convicting her husband Lyle of Richard’s murder. In this way, Jo represents how a white-supremacist society denies the possibility that white women could be attracted to Black men, while insisting that Black men must be attracted to white women—and it uses the latter claim to justify violence against Black men.

Conversely, Parnell James’s first love at age 18 was a 17-year-old Black girl named Pearl. Parnell believes that they genuinely loved each other because they shared their dreams and knew each other as individuals. Yet Parnell knows that many of his white male peers harass and rape Black girls and women with impunity. His awareness that white-supremacist society taints white male attraction to Black women with violence makes him feel “sick” and uncertain in his relationship with Pearl. After Pearl’s mother discovers their relationship and sends Pearl away, Parnell never has another genuinely loving romantic relationship again. Instead, he has what he calls “black fever”—a desire to escape his guilt-ridden whiteness through sexual contact with Black people. Through Jo and Parnell, the play shows how in a white-supremacist society, interracial sexual attraction is fraught with violence while love is difficult, if not impossible, to find.