We Wear The Mask By Paul Laurence Dunbar

The poem “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar has the message of suppressing one’s emotions in order to appeal to others who appear to be superior. This is shown in the line “This debt we pay to human guile” because the speaker believes that the wearers of the mask do so either in shame or to protect themselves from those who have achieved so much more than themselves. The mask conceals their “tears and sighs” because they do not want them to be seen. But the mask could also hide their sense of inferiority from other mask wearers, and perhaps this is why the mask is worn, for self-defense despite the knowledge that they are all the same.
I feel as though many other classmates would agree that they can relate to this poem’s message, at
least in the sense of hiding one’s own flaws out of the fear of others discovering it, and that only solidifies the poem’s message. The poem reminded me of the existential novels The Stranger and Notes from the Underground, where masks and ‘the other’ are prominent themes as well. The sense of hiding from others through a metaphorical mask, or pretending to be fine with one’s own situation, makes much more sense after looking up the poem and discovering that it is in reference to the Jim Crow era of the United States. The bigger message in either case is that we are hiding the problems around us behind our own hubris, despite these problems affecting everyone. If we were to take off the mask, perhaps we may see this, but the irony in the poem is that a mask, taken literally, has eyeholes, meaning that can already see what is wrong.