Negro Sarah's Brownstone Apartment Room
Significance in Plot
Sarah is the main character and main narrator of the story, but is an unreliable narrator as she hallucinations (may imply schizophrenia) as revealed by the Landlady. The four characters (Queen Victoria, Duchess of Hapsburg, Patrice Lumumba, and Jesus) are four different "selves" of Sarah and represent her mind in different ways. Sarah repeating herself when she tells the audience about her past as well as the different characters repeating the same words with different implications raises tension in the play and also makes the audience think about the words again and again.
Profile
Name: Sarah
Ethnicity: Black (African American)
Appearance: When she dresses as the Duchess of Hapsburg, she wears a headpiece but normal dresses like a student in "dark clothes and dark stockings" (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg.8). She describes herself as, "good-looking in a boring way; no glaring Negroid features, medium nose, medium mouth and pale yellow skin" (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg. 9) as well as "kinky" black hair and grey eyes.
Education: English Major at Community College
Room Description
The room is described to be "a small room on the top floor of a brownstone in the West Nineties in New York, a room filled with [Sarah's] dark old volumes, a narrow bed and [...] old photographs of castles and monarchs of England" on the wall (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg.8).
Significance of Name "Negro Sarah"
Sarah is the name of the biblical wife of Abraham. It is a Hebrew word meaning noblewoman or princess (Very Well Family).
The way the character is called "Negro Sarah" seems to differentiate her from the Biblical Sarah or "other Sarahs" on the basis of race. It also defines her identity by her blackness, which is similar to how the character, herself, is obsessed with her hatred toward being "black."
Sarah's Idolization of Whiteness
Statue of Queen Victoria
At the top of Sarah's first monologue, she starts to describe the gigantic plaster statue of Queen Victoria she has in her room and idolizes. There have been many different statues of Queen Victoria made, but Sarah specifies that it is a replica of the one in London, the one that symbolizes the imperialism of Ireland (YCBA). She found it in a dusty shop in Morningside heights and placed it "opposite the door as [she] enters the room," (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg.8) so it’s the first thing she sees. She even made three steps made of boards that lead up to the statue as if the queen is elevated above everything else in her room.
The statue is mentioned to be "a thing of terror, possessing the quality of nightmares, suggesting large and probable deaths" (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg. 8). While this statement may refer to the lives lost during Britain's colonialization efforts around the world, it also serves as a foreshadowing of the multiple deaths of Sarah's selves as well as the deaths of Sarah's parents in the past that are soon to be revealed.
Magazines
Sarah mentions that she wants to "become even a more pallid Negro than [she is] now; pallid like Negroes on the covers of American Negro magazines; soulless, educated and irreligious" (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg.8) which seems to briefly show Adrienne Kennedy's stance on the American Negro beauty standards than Sarah's own stance. It shows what people prioritize beauty over. They would rather look whiter, thinner, and wealthier than showing their personality or values. Models are considered more like dolls to decorate and look at rather than people. A statement that really supports this view is Sarah saying, "I want not to be. I ask nothing except anonymity” (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg. 8). She is willing to give up her identity to satisfy a social standard.
Sarah's Admiration of Edith Sitwell
Sarah's admiration of the English poet, Edith Sitwell, is introduced when she says, “I write poetry filling white page after white page with imitations of Edith Sitwell” (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg. 8).
Edith Sitwell descended from ancestors such as "kings of France, the English Plantagenets, Robert Bruce and the Macbeths” (English Heritage) and also wrote a few books regarding such large British figures: “Sitwell’s triumphant 75th year, 1962, saw the publication of her biography of Elizabeth I, The Queens and the Hive, her final collection of poetry, The Outcasts, and the reissue of Fanfare for Elizabeth (first published 1946).” It is possible that Sarah had read one of Sitwell's books titled Victoria of England (1936) (English Heritage).
Stolen Culture through Art
A repeated line from Sarah is that it is her "dream to live in rooms with European antiques and my Queen Victoria, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books, a piano, oriental carpets and to eat my meals on a white glass table" (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg. 9) which shows many images of privilege and colonialism.
Antiques, photographs, books, and instruments are all luxuries that imply a high standard of living. None of them are necessities to live but embellishments, and they are related to how highly others would perceive of her if they saw her room. Even the emphasis on the type of table she would eat on implies that her worries would be beyond whether she has food on the table. Roman ruins represent the remains of a great colonizing empire, and oriental carpets represent those empires taking cultural items from the countries they colonized. This is similar to how England took many cultural artifacts from their colonies and displayed them as their own wealth. (Supplemental Article on African Artifacts in British Museums, Aljazeera)
Sarah's Hair Loss and Self Esteem
Although Sarah dreams of having white friends, her vision of a perfect community does not include her own happiness.
“My white friends, like myself, will be shrewd, intellectual and anxious for death. Anyone’s death. I will mistrust them, as I do myself, waver in their opinion of me, as I waver in the opinion of myself. But if I had not wavered in my opinion of myself, then my hair would never have fallen out.” (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg.9)
Her loss of hair seems to be connected to her low sense of esteem for herself. She does not see herself as worthy of love, and therefore is desperate to find a scapegoat for that lack of love: her father's blackness. This is supported by when she says, "“And if my hair hadn’t fallen out, I wouldn’t have bludgeoned my father’s head with an ebony mask” (Funnyhouse of a Negro, pg.9)
Sarah's Hallucination of Killing her Father
Sarah keeps repeated that she "bludgeoned her father with an ebony mask," which may mean that she killed him with his own blackness -- something that he did not deserve to be blamed for. This leads to her father being sacrificed for a greater sin than he committed, phrased as Sarah "nailing her father on a cross." Just as Jesus is said to have taken on the responsibility of all the sins of the world, Sarah's father takes on the blame and shame Sarah has for all the blackness of the world.