Document Type
Article
Abstract
In this paper, I use the iconicity of 1960s Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to theorize the visualization and formation of an ecstatic postcolonial whiteness.
To begin with, I adapt Edward Said’s formulation of orientalism to discuss Elizabeth Taylor’s exotic turn and emergence as a white oriental that buttresses the production of her film Cleopatra (1963). Through archival research, I map out Taylor’s orientalism, in this case the malleability of her image to exoticization evidenced by her enthusiastic conversion to Judaism in 1959, her influence as “Cleopatra” to set style trends in women’s makeup, hair and fashion in the 1960s, and her relentless globetrotting during that decade and how it is read through the visual register. I also posit that this Egyptomanic moment in women’s style is a naturalization of the linkage of consumerism to the symbolic ownership of colonial others that remakes the white feminine body onto a screen in which imperial desires are played out.
I affirm that Taylor’s exotic turn is initiated through her encounters with what Toni Morrison calls an “Africanist presence” on the set of her epic orientalist film. As her persona is re-forged and permanently melds with that of the mythic African queen, Taylor’s sense of freedom and the ecstasy of her release from an ironclad studio contract perhaps not surprising coincides with her participation in the production of images of black bondage, since Morrison has argued that philosophies of white freedom have often been realized through the white subject’s cognizance of the suppressed black body. Elizabeth Taylor’s very proximity to images of slavery illuminates her newfound liberation and her rebirth as a despotic and powerful international superstar occurs at the eve of the death of the Hollywood studio system and is contemporary with a historic cycle of African independence movements. This pivotal event in her career cites a tradition of the white artist’s transcendence into genius during moments of white uncertainty, in this case, Taylor’s rise as the greatest star in the world. Furthermore, her most iconic film interpolates the white melancholia that accompanies the loss of imperial power and presents whiteness as a cultural imperative rather than purely a visual category. Finally, I theorize Elizabeth Taylor’s affair with Richard Burton as a performative act made up of a series of masquerades in which the lovers reveal the postcolonial white subject’s desire to claim both an imperial identity and the identity of the other. Burton not only falls madly in love with Taylor as the white oriental (his diaries are replete with imperial metaphors about her body as an exotic spectacle) but I also argue that Burton’s stardom hinges on his ability to replicate Homi Bhabha’s notion of “colonial mimicry,” about which he writes, “the menace of its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority.”
Richard Burton’s masterful elocution of English (he was not a native speaker of the language), his roles as imperial figures on screen (Alexander the Great, Henry VIII) his encyclopedic knowledge of the British literary canon and his simultaneous valorization of Welsh culture and masculinity foreground the various tensions of a postcolonial white subject coming into proper whiteness, a process that is spectacularized to the delight of viewers everywhere. Taylor’s white orientalism and Burton’s imperial ascendency are truly what make them the superstar couple of the subsequent postcolonial jet-setting decade.
Repository Citation
Shin, Gloria. "‘If it be Love Indeed, Tell Me How Much’: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and White Pleasure After Empire." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 12, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–23. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol12/iss1/5