Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Oppression by Mainstream Society

The speaker of “We Wear the Mask” belongs to a community that has suffered due to its marginalization from an oppressive mainstream society. The speaker emphasizes this point through their extended metaphor of the mask. From the very beginning of the poem, the speaker insists that the members of their community all wear a mask (lines 1–2):

     We wear the mask that grins and lies,
     It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.

Already in the poem’s opening lines, the speaker insists on the mask as a tool for hiding. Specifically, the mask hides the wearer by disguising all signs of pain and suffering under the cover of a false grin. But what are the conditions that have led the speaker to insist on the need to “wear the mask”? The speaker offers an enigmatic answer as the stanza continues (lines 3–5):

     This debt we pay to human guile;
     With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
     And mouth with myriad subtleties.

The speaker claims that their community wears the mask to pay a “debt . . . to human guile.” Put in other words, the mask is the price the speaker’s community must pay for the deviousness and deceit of others. No doubt these others belong to the mainstream society. It’s therefore mainly due to the oppression of mainstream society that this community is forced to mask their “torn and bleeding hearts” with deceitful smiles.

The Importance of Preserving Dignity

Although the speaker spends much of the poem emphasizing the pain they and their community have suffered, they also foreground the importance of preserving dignity despite the pain. Here, too, the mask plays a significant symbolic role. According to the speaker, the mask’s primary function is to deceive the outside world into believing that all is well within their community. This type of deception aims not just to disguise the community’s suffering, but also to conceal their vulnerability. If the outside world is the primary cause of the community’s pain, it would be that much more agonizing to show their vulnerability and thereby suffer the indignity of the oppressor’s pity. The mask therefore shields the community from the outside world’s gaze and protects them from further harm. The mask also protects the community by safeguarding their sense of dignity. For the community to survive, they will require an internal source of resilience. Hence, they “wear the mask” to ensure the protection of their last source of self-respect and strength.

The Rift Between Private Experience and Public Presentation

“We Wear the Mask” isn’t just a poem about a beleaguered community struggling against the forces of oppression. It’s also a poem about the rift between private experience and public presentation. Throughout the poem, the speaker pits their community against a larger “world” that has caused their suffering and yet also seems invested in “counting all [their] tears and sighs” (line 7). This investment has placed the speaker’s community in a difficult position, at once accountable to each other and yet also pressured to account for themselves, as a community, to the outside world. This position creates a rift in the community’s sense of identity, since their private experience will inevitably differ greatly from their public presentation. This rift is symbolized by the mask metaphor that dominates the poem. In the opening lines, the speaker offers a clear image of how public-facing mask “grins and lies” (line 1) precisely by hiding the private grief that has saddened “our cheeks and . . . our eyes” (line 2). Although the speaker’s community has suffered due to their marginalization from the outside world, their pain has been amplified by the need to live with the rift between their private and public selves.